Comment by FiloSottile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FiloSottile | Hacker News Reader

_o/ hi all, age author here! age is the one of my projects that grew most organically into an ecosystem. It's always great to see what people build with it. Happy to answer any questions.

Here are some previous discussions

132 points on Feb 26, 2023 | 77 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34936504

126 points on Sept 26, 2022 | 54 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32980141

113 points on June 11, 2022 | 33 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31705670

494 points on Sept 6, 2021 | 88 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435613

466 points on Dec 27, 2019 | 199 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895671

and here some related resources

- a list of age ecosystem projects https://github.com/FiloSottile/awesome-age

- the format specification https://c2sp.org/age

- the Go library docs https://pkg.go.dev/filippo.io/age

- the CLI man page https://filippo.io/age/age.1

- the large reusable test suite (which I should write about!) https://c2sp.org/CCTV/age

- an interoperable Rust implementation by @str4d https://github.com/str4d/rage

- an official TypeScript implementation https://github.com/FiloSottile/typage (based on libsodium.js in the latest version, and on pure-js Noble libraries on main)

- a YubiKey plugin by @str4d https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey

- the plugin protocol specification https://c2sp.org/age-plugin

- a Windows GUI by @spieglt https://github.com/spieglt/winage

- a discussion of the authentication properties of age https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-authentication/

- a discussion of the plugin architecture https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-plugins/

- a discussion of a potential post-quantum plugin https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/post-quantum-age/

- a password-store fork that uses age instead of gpg https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage (see also: how I use it with a YubiKey https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/passage/)

Age is great. I used the rust crate to write an ftp server that encrypts the files before they hit disk (specific use case is having a drop box for my network scanner) and I love the simplicity and composability it provides.

One feature request: it would be awesome to have paraphrase encryption for age private keys.

Identity files can be passphrase encrypted and cmd/age will transparently ask for the passphrase before using them. Is that what you meant?

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age?tab=readme-ov-file#passph...

Yeah that’s it. Probably just wasn’t supported in the rust age library when I used it. Will double check.

Have you considered writing passage in Go to integrate age and age-plugin-yubikey as a single binary to make it more convenient to setup and use?

Combining Passage, pass-otp, and age into a single Go app has actually been on my personal hobby-project TODO list (but I haven't gotten around to it yet).

Integrating age plugins into this binary is not something I would do, though. Besides the fact that the plugins are separate projects with their own release schedules, they are also in different languages (plugin-yubikey is Rust, plugin-se is Swift, ...), and you would need to fork them anyway for communication. I guess you could bundle the binaries together in a package, and make sure the search path searches for the bundled binaries as a fallback.

Maybe I'm dense but I can't figure out howto verify/authenticate encrypted files.

Is there something missing in the documentation.

Age is designed for a single purpose: Encryption and decryption of files. To create digital signatures use another specialized tool like minisign instead.

Specialized tools are simpler than one do-it-all tool.

Simpler, but not necessarily as capable! From < https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-authentication/>:

> If you encrypt and then sign, an attacker can strip your signature, replace it with their own, and make it look like they encrypted the file even if they don't actually know the contents.

> If you sign and then encrypt, the recipient can decrypt the file, keep your signature, and encrypt it to a different recipient, making it look like you intended to send the file to them.

Both cases assume that the user doesn't understand what a signature means. In either case it means that the signer certified the thing signed. Are paper signatures getting so rare that we are collectively starting to forget this?

> make it look like they encrypted the file even if they don't actually know the contents.

I might as well encrypt a message "add $10000 to my account" with the bank's public key, sign it with my own key and send it...

Afaik the x25519 recipient uses chacha20poly1305 which is authenticated

Only in the case of symmetrical encryption. Then the authentication is based on the shared secret key.

Hi

Do you have an opinion or comment on this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159236

For those wondering, they answered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41160037

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