age: actually good encryption
20.08.2023 2 min readWhat
AGE
- Actually Good Encryption
Really easy to use (I mean, compared to GPG…)
#TODO: check out minisign
for signing
GPG vs AGE
TLDR:
age
has better simplicity if the main goal is encryption- However,
gpg
has signatures
Documentation
Personally, I found the docs to be a little… terse. But, that could very well just be a “me” problem.
Luckily, it’s AGE is ultimately quite simple - and a few blog posts got me to where I need to be. I’m not going to rehash what’s already in the docs, but here are some short notes & thoughts:
Check contents of passphrase-protected keypair
You might not know to do this, but you can (maybe someone else that isn’t me would have intuited this faster). Useful if you forgot the public key. Caveat: you must remember the passphrase 😅
$ age -d ./key.age
Enter passphrase:
# created: 2023-08-19T20:04:32+08:00
# public key: age156umuxyuwxqsyydf74ekxlcantyemphv3du0fcum0f9vnkjck3jsf5eldt
AGE-SECRET-KEY-SOME-LONG-STRING
Send stuff through SSH
This is really cool.
$ curl https://github.com/benjojo.keys | age -R - example.jpg > example.jpg.age
You don’t even need a recipient’s AGE key to encrypt stuff for someone. You can just use their ssh
key.
Now, if only I had someone to send stuff to…