Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library • Hacker News Board

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#131

Post by arcxi » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:47 PM UTC

upofadown wrote: post #125

tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little vacuous. Why are you signing? Why are you encrypting? Those are different operations. What are you trying to accomplish? The biggest problem with PGP is that its most popular use cases tend to be people bodging this old clanking command line tool into cryptosystems that (a) PGP wasn't designed for and (b) purpose-built cryptosystems are much better at . One of the reasons age is so constrained is tha…

>Why are you encrypting? In any case I can think of, people encrypt things because they want to restrict who can know what those things are. >Why are you signing? In the context of encrypted files, you would sign because you want to know if an attacker has modified or more simply just replaced your file. Authenticated encryption is considered more or less standard these days. >Those are different operations. Except f…

sign&encrypt does not protect you either, and asymmetrical encryption is authenticated if you keep your recipient key a secret. see https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-authentication/

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#132

Post by arcxi » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:54 PM UTC

qyckudnefDi5 wrote: post #90

I know there are specialized backup tools like restic or borg, but I like to keep things simple. Is using age like this to encrypt my files before uploading them to untrusted cloud storage not ok? tar > age > cloud Some comments mention signing with minisign. Should I be doing that like this: tar > age > minisign > cloud

I made a tiny shell script that combines tar+age, you may find it useful for simplicity

https://github.com/arcxio/urn/blob/main/urn

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#133

Post by nvy » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #118

nvy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coq is pronounced exactly how it looks. It's the French word for rooster and for the language, comes from part of the guy's name.

> It's the French word for rooster It's also the English word for rooster.

Well, cock is. Coq is not an English word.

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#134

Post by upofadown » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 8:03 PM UTC

arcxi wrote: post #131

upofadown wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why are you encrypting? In any case I can think of, people encrypt things because they want to restrict who can know what those things are. >Why are you signing? In the context of encrypted files, you would sign because you want to know if an attacker has modified or more simply just replaced your file. Authenticated encryption is considered more or less standard these days. >Those are different operations. Except f…

sign&encrypt does not protect you either, and asymmetrical encryption is authenticated if you keep your recipient key a secret. see https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-authentication/

>sign&encrypt does not protect you either...

Well actually it does if the attacker does not have access to the decryption key ... which is very much the normal case. Yes, I know about "surreptitious forwarding" but I consider the idea silly in terms of usability[1].

>asymmetrical encryption is authenticated if you keep your recipient key a secret...

This is an expression of the idea that you can just keep the recipient identity (public key) away from the attacker and prevent them from creating a valid ciphertext. The fundamental issue is that this depends on a poorly specified property of the cryptography. Any protection against an attacker being able to derive the public key is merely accidental. The author of the linked article says:

>I am confident the property holds for the X25519 recipients, and that it would hold for a hypothetical Kyber768+X25519 one,...

... but provides no explicit argument to that effect. ... and then continues:

>...but it's important not to advertise it as an age-wide property.

In practice the recipient identity key will show up on the command line and/or will be kept in an unencrypted file. Age itself treats it as a potentially public value.

If you and the recipient have the ability to share and keep a secret value secret, why use asymmetrical encryption in the first place? Why not put that value in the plaintext as discussed previously in the article? The reason that there is not more research into the security of secret recipient identities is because there is no practical value in such use.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:forwarding

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#135

Post by tptacek » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 8:19 PM UTC

upofadown wrote: post #125

tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little vacuous. Why are you signing? Why are you encrypting? Those are different operations. What are you trying to accomplish? The biggest problem with PGP is that its most popular use cases tend to be people bodging this old clanking command line tool into cryptosystems that (a) PGP wasn't designed for and (b) purpose-built cryptosystems are much better at . One of the reasons age is so constrained is tha…

>Why are you encrypting? In any case I can think of, people encrypt things because they want to restrict who can know what those things are. >Why are you signing? In the context of encrypted files, you would sign because you want to know if an attacker has modified or more simply just replaced your file. Authenticated encryption is considered more or less standard these days. >Those are different operations. Except f…

Ciphertext authentication and asymmetric signatures are not the same thing.

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#136

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 09, 2024, 11:18 PM UTC

qyckudnefDi5 wrote: post #99

tptacek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use specialized backup tools! There are cryptographic constructions designed specifically for backup. You will get better backup and better encryption.

"Better backup" aside, as I understand that I'd miss out on deduplication and all the other things backup software can do like keeping track of what it has backed up etc. "Better encryption": Can you explain why age's encryption isn't sufficient if it's recommended for encrypting files? Really want to understand how it's recommended for encrypting and sharing a file over an untrusted channel like email, but not recom…

[deleted]

Re: Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library

#137

Post by Omnikron13 » Wed, Aug 14, 2024, 12:19 AM UTC

jjice wrote: post #78

It would be fantastic if Age (or at least something similar) could become standard on Unix machines. I'd love a more Unix-philosophy following tool than GPG/PGP to be around for encryption. That said, I don't think new standard tools for Unix machines are very common. The closest thing I can think of in the last while is `jq`, but it's not "preinstalled on your machine" kind of standard, just "my script might just us…

People might assume you have ripgrep, or fd, I suppose?

Ultimately, though, I think the importance of having a guarantee that the OS has the complete built-in 'swiss army chainsaw' (to borrow a Perl-ism) just isn't as high priority in the age of modern package managed, dependency graphed, fibre connected always online systems vs. big monolithic beasts that you maybe 'make install' the odd extra piece of software you heard about on usenet, once the 300 baud modem is done bleep-blooping out the source from the CVS repository. =P

That said, we do get new toys, right up to the kernel level; compression algorithms like zstd, hashing algorithms like xxhash, the slow & steady (glacial?) advance of BTRFS features...

If there is demand for something like age, you'd expect it'll filter through into the base of distros, become 'de facto standard', glom onto the kernel, etc. etc. like other stuff people find useful and want, no?

(Even if not, it's written in go, so... 'go install filippo.io/age/cmd/...@latest'? =d Issues aside, modern lang-specific package managers make it stupidly easy to grab software these days.)