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Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

I don't think age does any real password extension. So if you are used to something that does (GnuPG's 0.1 second extension for example) you might want to add an extra word or two to your passphrase.

Pet usability peeve triggered here. If we create a system that completely depends on the strength of a password/passphrase we have to give the user concrete advice on how to create a password/passphrase that will be strong on that particular system.

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This password manager seems to use private keys, so there is no passphrase used for encryption here.

However, generally speaking, age uses scrypt for password key derivation, with a default work factor of 2^18 (1 second on modern machines). Unlike GnuPG's S2K, scrypt is both CPU and memory hard.

Then how short can I make my passphrase? It should be shorter than with GnuPG but no one knows how long to make the passphrase for GnuPG either...

This gets back to my original peeve. This sort of thing has to be worked out for the user. I looked through the available documentation. Was I as a user expected to look through the source code and figure it out for myself?

My understanding is that, even with a CPU and memory-hard KDF, the standard recommendation is to use a strong and difficult to guess password. It’s meant to be a layer of protection against cracking, not an opportunity to use a shorter password than you normally would.

OK, but what is that? I am a user. What do I do?

Questions like these are indistinguishable from trolling. You've responded to the direct, common-knowledge answer to your question by repeating the question. Please stop doing this.

I can't edit my post so I am replying to it. It has been a while but I should still apologize...

I managed to get two things wrong in one post. As a result I ended up disparaging the Age project for no reason and causing confusion about the Pa project. I continued the confusion in subsequent replies.

I will try to be better about this sort of thing in the future and am sorry.

I'm not following. This encryption model here is a master private key, so there's no master password involved. Are you referring to the generated passwords? If so, the default seems reasonably long (and is outside of age's scope anyways, since it's just the encrypted content).

Sorry. I missed that. The ultimate security of the saved passwords here depends on the security of the operating system and file system.

So I really should of complained that this fact was not made very clear to the user... :)

> So I really should of complained that this fact was not made very clear to the user

how could i have made this more clear? what would you like to see?

> I don't think age does any real password extension.

Did you even bother to check?

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/blob/main/scrypt.go

This isn't exactly hidden.

That is source code. I as a user should not have to look at the source code so that I can use a program.

If you feel yourself technically proficient enough to comment on cryptography (mostly PGP apologia), then you should be capable of looking at source code to figure out whether or not something "does any real password extension".

If anyone else (i.e. "a user") made this mistake, I'd be more sympathetic. But not for you.

You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. Are you a cryptography expert, or aren't you?

If yes, then failing to bother to check the source code is a faux pas.

If no, then I expect you to stop trying to argue as a cryptography expert the next time someone points out that PGP is bad cryptography.

I don't care which you choose. I only ask that you stick to it.

… okay, then look at the spec, which is beautifully simple: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/age.md#the-scrypt-rec...

Please stop trolling.

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