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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

> It’s unclear to me any stateful keychains are implied here.

Encrypted files are encrypted to a key. It could be a one time use key encrypted to another key as PGP and Age both do, but still there is a long lived secret a user must maintain somewhere, somehow, and have a strategy for backup, rotation, discovery, validation, etc etc.

> it’s unclear to me why point 5 belongs in the cryptosystem layer (such as with PGP) rather than on some higher, more adaptable layer.

There are a ton of other ways these problems could be solved. If we had a time machine we would go back and design way different tools and specs to address the problems PGP solves. We would redesign the internet too.

What I take issue with is people recommending age or minisign or signing with ssh keys when all of these just pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist, and thus set people up to fail.

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> but still there is a long lived secret a user must maintain somewhere

Of course. I'm not suggesting that there's no need to have long-lived private key material. But that does not require some thick GPG-keyring-style concept (especially one that includes both public and private key material). Something like a directory of private keys (like with SSH) fits the bill here and yet bears precious little resemblance to GPG's system.

> have a strategy for backup, rotation, discovery, validation, etc etc

Again, I see no reason to bake this stuff (I'll call it "identity management") deeply into the cryptosystem itself. Especially because different encryption use-cases have vastly different needs. The identity management needed for a one-time message exchange between humans shares little structural similarity to that needed for authenticating OS packages from multiple parties. These two use cases are almost entirely disjoint, I daresay. To the point that any effort to devise a shared abstraction will only muddy the waters since there is so little intrinsic similarity.

> What I take issue with is people recommending age or minisign or signing with ssh keys when all of these just pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist, and thus set people up to fail.

I can agree with this for sure. If you need these various features, then age et al. do not fit the bill.

On the other hand, in cases where these systems have adequate functionality or can be shimmed up by other systems, they're lightweight and easy for users to comprehend.

Take commit-signing with SSH keys to provide verification mediated by GitHub. Everyone (lol) knows how to generate and manage an SSH key. Easy enough to set up git for signing with that key. Then GitHub uses its own identity layer to show users what commits are verified and which aren't. From the user's perspective, it's super lightweight, easy. When it comes to cryptographic signatures with long-lived identities, it basically doesn't get easier than this.

Of course, that GitHub example misses some features, and isn't perfect. But it captures a lot of the value of signing with a bare minimum of error-prone work for the user.

Wait, how does minisign "pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist"? Minisign is an example of a purpose-built tool designed specifically to address a problem PGP attempts to solve. We're now talking about two different tools each of which addresses something in PGP's scope. If we keep fleshing out PGP's scope, we'll keep finding more tools like this, because very few people operationalize PGP and lots of people have the problems PGP attempts to solve.

Your argument doesn't cohere.

I feel like the rhetorical sleight of hand PGP advocates too often fall back on is the idea that while there may be tools that do some of what PGP does, and those tools put together may comprise a superset of PGP's functionality, there is no one tool that does everything PGP does by itself. But that's the whole point. Part of what makes PGP so bad is that it's a Swiss Army Knife.

Minisign and Age entirely dodge the actually hardest problem with humans using cryptography, that PGP puts front and center: identity and public key discovery. You cannot just skip these!

If a human focused cryptography tool gives a user no way to know if they are encrypting to the correct public key of someone else, or no way to distinguish a real signature from one of an impersonator, then the tools failed to do their job.

Age is maybe useful for personal encryption use cases, but it is no way a replacement for all encryption use cases of PGP, especially between humans. Let alone signing and authentication which would be a prerequisite to do this safely.

PGP does an absolutely dreadful job of key discovery, and further, there is no reason to couple one mode of "key discovery" to a signing tool. Different business domains will have different optimal key discovery architectures.

My guess is that at this point more professional environments (think on the level of "companies and projects") have integrated age and minisign than have integrated PGP, which is striking given how long PGP has had to demonstrate success. In 2025, if you built a new identity system for, say, code, virtual machine or container provenance, or secure messaging, your competent security team would very likely shoot you down.

This is just another instance of the same sleight of hand I identified upthread. It's actually bad that PGP does all this stuff, for the simple reason that different real-world problems have different cryptography requirements. For that reason, competently built systems don't do what the PGP ecosystem does, of fielding a Swiss Army Knife instead of a chef's knife or a table saw. Then the PGP ecosystem tries to ding those tools for not repeating PGP's mistake.

Perhaps you are not aware of PGP Web Key Discovery or Keyoxide.

I know of no solutions even close to this for Minisign or Age keys that does not rely on centralized corporations like Microsoft.

You're not responding to the main point. Here's tptacek's wording:

> PGP does an absolutely dreadful job of key discovery, and further, there is no reason to couple one mode of "key discovery" to a signing tool. Different business domains will have different optimal key discovery architectures.

Here's how I expressed it to you:

> Again, I see no reason to bake this stuff (I'll call it "identity management") deeply into the cryptosystem itself. Especially because different encryption use-cases have vastly different needs. The identity management needed for a one-time message exchange between humans shares little structural similarity to that needed for authenticating OS packages from multiple parties. These two use cases are almost entirely disjoint, I daresay. To the point that any effort to devise a shared abstraction will only muddy the waters since there is so little intrinsic similarity.

I love that age lets one reuse ssh identities and thus identity sharing systems. The single most useful thing I ever wrote was a tool to sync github identities with age. https://github.com/tarasglek/github-to-sops

This way you get git for change tracking on your secrets and who-has-access-to-secrets and key rotation and this can be trivially expanded to other forges.

Its easy to introduce age this way into any modern project whereas gpg would-ve been a non started on most teams I worked on.

disclaimer: this was mostly vibe-coded because I really did not want to work on this and wasnt sure if teammates would adopt it. Then it just worked, so stayed ugly inside

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