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One of the things I like most about Age is that it made the very deliberate choice to __not__ become a general tool like GPG, and focuses only on one thing: sec
by sixhobbits 4y ago
One of the things I like most about Age is that it made the very deliberate choice to __not__ become a general tool like GPG, and focuses only on one thing: secure encryption. You can read some of the reasoning about specifically not supporting signing as well here [0], but TL;DR -- it's a hard problem and age isn't really designed for communication and doesn't want to become a "a worse version of signal".
[0] https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/issues/51 https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/issues/51
- vaylian 4y agoI'm familiar with GnuPG and I'm trying to understand how I can actually use age in practice. There doesn't seem to be a good explanation beyond the command line usage. My current understanding based on various pieces across the internet is the following: 1. age has only a single use-case: Encrypting files using public key cryptography or alternatively password-based encryption. 2. It is technically possible to encrypt e-mails with age, but it is not encouraged because the author considers e-mail to be fundamentally broken 3. age should be considered as a part of a wider cryptographic ecosystem. For example, if you need to sign files (or messages), you would reach for a different tool like minisign. I wonder if there is another tool/service that one can use for public key distribution 4. There is currently no tool that tries to combine different modern crypto tools into one big suite. I have no information about what age's author would think about such a tool. 5. age is intended to be minimalistic and therefore less bug-prone/misuse-prone. 6. The author of age talks a lot about forward secrecy. But there is no good explanation on how to manage key pairs over time. Does that sound right?