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Been down this road. GPG exists for that purpose. Although not intednded for disk files,s/mime has cross platform support as well. To answer your question,inte
by badrabbit 7y ago
Been down this road. GPG exists for that purpose. Although not intednded for disk files,s/mime has cross platform support as well.
To answer your question,interoperability with other applications is neither expected nor desired for most apps that store encrypted data in a file. Quite often there are additional implementation details to be included (for which AEAD supportig cipher modes account for).
Let's say I encrypt outputs of my program and store them in a file,I will most likely serialize it,encrypt it and store it only caring about my app being able to read and deserialize it. There is mostly no need for interoperability for data-at-rest encryption since there are a lot of interoperable protocols for data-in-transit encryption. I do think it would not hurt to have something like .gpg but more srandardized and easy to implement.
- binwiederhier 7y agoYou bring up a good point. In most cases interoperability is not required. However, assuming it find enough adoption, having a standard format would likely make many things easier, like switching languages, or moving parts of the application logic into the database layer. Think of json support in databases these days and how it enables versatile use across applications. Another benefit would IMHO be the possibility for a simplified API for developers. Many engineers don't know what AEAD or block cipher modes even are. Providing a simple encrypt()/decrypt() function that would work across applications would be awesome.