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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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