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Passage: A fork of password-store that uses age instead of GnuPG
- creamytaco 5y agoNo thanks, I'll stick with GnuPG.
- aranw 5y agoWhy stick with GnuPG? I'm also interested in trying to understand why use age instead of GnuPG?
- zahllos 5y agoThe main argument in favour of age is that it only does one thing: encrypting files, and does it 'well' in the sense there is no need to edit your gnupg config file to exclude all the crypto from the 90s that your version of gnupg might decide to default to. This makes things significantly simpler in terms of the code for age, which reduces the possible bugs and possible misuse. GnuPG is more versatile and tries to solve a number of (arguably, orthogonal) problems, including signing and authentication (by users and also of keys in the web of trust). This leads to more complexity, and some parts, e.g. the web of trust, can't really be described as being a success. Others, such as sign and encrypt, likely don't achieve semantic security (also the case in SMIME / CMS, and I'm not sure if this has ever been fixed) and definitely don't achieve the forward/future secrecy guarantees of say Signal. Age isn't trying to be a messenger, so it doesn't need to worry about this. It comes down to this: if you use AES-Something with GnuPG or you use ChaCha20-Poly1305 with Age, it is unlikely ever to be meaningfully broken in our lifetimes (including if you are currently 1 day old and including by quantum computers) and everything will be fine. But age will only use ChaCha20-Poly1305, and the format is pretty simple, while GnuPG can be convinced to decrypt CAST5 encrypted messages and has a much more complex format that introduces a greater risk of binary parser vulnerabilities. Age is written in Go (there's also Rage, written in Rust), whereas GnuPG is a big old ball of C, so if there are parser bugs, GnuPG is bad news and Go/Rust are likely hopefully sound.
- upofadown 5y ago>...while GnuPG can be convinced to decrypt CAST5 encrypted messages... That's not actually a problem. The problem would be if it could be convinced to encrypt CAST5 messages. Assuming that is actually a problem. Is there anything particularly wrong with CAST5 other than the block size?
- dspillett 5y ago> That's not actually a problem. The problem would be if it could be convinced to encrypt CAST5 messages. I don't disagree, but would add that if the encryption used is believed to be insufficiently secure these days all tools should warn loudly that this is the case when asked to decrypt them.
- johnisgood 5y ago> Age is written in Go (there's also Rage, written in Rust), whereas GnuPG is a big old ball of C, so if there are parser bugs, GnuPG is bad news and Go/Rust are likely hopefully sound. Well, on "written in Go" part, I remember looking at the crypto code 2-3 years ago (??), and it was full of unnecessary copies. You know the practice of using explicit_bzero, avoiding copying, and so forth? In this case neither I remember was being the followed practice (it uses GC anyways), in fact, I remember copying like no tomorrow. Correct me if I am wrong though. Regardless, languages with GC are usually a no-no. There is a chapter on it in "Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications by by Bruce Schneier, Niels Ferguson, and Tadayoshi Kohno", the name of the chapter is: "Implementation Issues". It mentions Java (as not being a good language for crypto due to GC), and I think C as well. In any case, it has been a while, and I am currently tired. Feel free to correct me, of course.
- wglb 5y agoKnowing who the author is and knowing what he knows and what projects he has completed I would expect that he is quite familiar with this citation and the body of literature surrounding it.
- srer 5y ago
- srer 5y agoI use pass, and have no desire to move away from gpg. I think gpg still provides "pretty good" privacy, I don't see any benefit that age would afford me with pass. (There are sore points to the OpenPGP user experience, integration with mail clients among others, along with the WoT, have in practice been not great. But these are not things you would encounter with pass.)
- dang 5y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jrootabega 5y agoI'm guessing you probably have something say about the criticisms of GnuPG, which would be good to talk about IMO. I find them less than convincing.
- ayushnix 5y agoIt would be better if the age specific code could be included upstream. This should, however, serve as a good point of reference.
- toomanymike 5y agoMany useful patches are posted to the upstream pass mailing list. They're rarely responded to. I don't know if that specifically drove the creation of this fork, but it's absolutely a frustration as a pass user
- ayushnix 5y agoCan you point me to a specific example?
- hkt 5y agoNot going to use it (I already use pass) but this is great and I'm glad there is another option out there for people.
- atweiden 5y agoSee also: https://git.sr.ht/~gpanders/passage https://git.sr.ht/~gpanders/passage
- endymi0n 5y ago> The age backend is an experimental crypto backend [for gopass] based on age. It adds an encrypted keyring on top (using age in scrypt password mode). It also has (largely untested) support for specifying recipients as github users. This will use their ssh public keys for age encryption. It is well positioned to eventually replace gpg as the default crypto backend. https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass/blob/master/docs/backends/age.md https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass/blob/master/docs/backends...
- Naac 5y agoI tried reading up on what age is, but I'm getting a cert error from their website: https://age-encryption.org/ https://age-encryption.org/
- FiloSottile 5y agoYour network is MitM’d by some incompetently operated security product. https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/issues/370 https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/issues/370
- Naac 5y agoThanks, that's exactly what happened.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- _wldu 5y agoI wrote a short blog post comparing PGP and Age a few weeks ago. Some may find it of interest: https://www.go350.com/posts/age-file-encryption/ https://www.go350.com/posts/age-file-encryption/
- aidenn0 5y agoThanks for that. One thing that wasn't mentioned is whether or not private keys can be stored in HSMs with age. I'm guessing since the authors recommend against password-protecting private keys that the answer is "no" but that's one reason that I pick GPG for things.
- FiloSottile 5y agoWe designed the plugin protocol (https://hackmd.io/@str4d/age-plugin-spec https://hackmd.io/@str4d/age-plugin-spec) and generally the age recipient/identity structure specifically to enable the use of hardware or remote keys! For example, https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey makes it very easy to use PIV tokens, including YubiKeys, with age. (Well, for now with rage, since plugin support is coming in age v1.1.0.) I argue against password-protecting keys by default because, unlike using hardware tokens, it doesn't protect against many threat models.
- jeremyw 5y agoCan you clarify re not password-protecting keys? If I run GUI applications, let's say, as my user -- as is the default in most operating systems -- they have general access to my files, including my keys-as-files, no? (Putting aside some minor restrictions MacOS and others are slowly making.)
- FiloSottile 5y agoYes, and they can also replace the age binary with one that uploads the password as soon as you type it. There is no meaningful security boundary to defend. We implemented support for password-encrypted keys for the cases where you store the key file in, say, Dropbox.
- a-dub 5y agoone issue with i remember with pass was that it leaks the length of the plaintext. was kinda hoping that maybe age offered a padding mode to avoid this, but i guess not.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AnonHP 5y agoWe need good GUI apps on multiple platforms for tools like this (and for tools like age/rage). It’s one thing to use such tools for oneself, but impossible to have many others adopt it if there’s no GUI.
- throwaway_2009 5y agoWhy do others need to adopt it? It's a useful tool regardless of how widely it's used. Would it become better if others used it as well?
- GekkePrutser 5y agoInteresting but I'd lose the ability to store the key on yubikeys. That's a deal-breaker for me.
- FiloSottile 5y agoThere is an example in the README for how to use age-plugin-yubikey :)
- emptysongglass 5y agoI don't see how age solves any of the problems of GPG that really matter i.e. how to write a simple secrets manager that can scale from 1 to enterprise. We used gopass at one of the earliest startups I worked for until we realized that all secrets needed to be manually rotated every time an employee left. I still use gopass for personal use but the idea of using it in a teams environment is just untenable unless you have nothing more than a handful of secrets to worry over. Age doesn't fix this. It just tries to make things simpler but in return you lose out on a bunch of standard interops that have propagated around GPG. I was legitimately excited about a new secrets backend until I understood nobody is actually writing it to solve real world problems. It largely appears to be a case of "writing it to do fewer things because that's what Unix hackers like".
- qbasic_forever 5y agoI don't think age, pass, etc. have ever claimed to be an enterprise solution. It sounds like you want Hashicorp's Vault or even a managed secret offering like what AWS, GCE, Azure, etc. all sell.
- Xylakant 5y ago> We used gopass at one of the earliest startups I worked for until we realized that all secrets needed to be manually rotated every time an employee left. No password manager that I’m aware of solves this or even claims to. When an employee leaves, you need to assume that they retain control of all passwords they previously had access to. They could have made a copy that’s beyond the control of your password manager (for example saved the password in the browser). What helps are reducing shared passwords, relying less on passwords in general (SSO, IAM, …) but for some cases you just have to bite the bullet and rotate the credentials.
- gregoriol 5y agoCould it work by using 2FA with a key, and the employee has to return the key when leaving the company? (in the sense that you wouldn't have to rotate the passwords then)
- aborsy 5y agoWhat benefits do I get if I use Passage instead of Pass? I get that it uses only one algorithm and does one thing. But that’s not a benefit impacting the end user in practice. Actually, my Pass also uses CV25519. It’s just, one is written in Go, one in C/bash. Looking at the list of CVEs for SSH, OpenVPN, OpenSSL and GPG, the latter has stood up pretty well. Plus, OpenPGP is a standard heavily audited which is important for interoperability (and arguably security).