age-plugin-yubikey VS kakoune-lsp

_o/ hi all, age author here!

The OP link is the spec, here's a few other things you might find interesting

- the Go reference implementation https://age-encryption.org

- the Go library docs https://pkg.go.dev/filippo.io/age

- the CLI man page https://filippo.io/age/age.1

- an interoperable Rust implementation by @str4d https://github.com/str4d/rage

- a YubiKey plugin by @str4d https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey

- the draft plugin protocol specification (which we should really merge) https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/pull/5/files?short_path=07bf8cc...

- a Windows GUI by @spieglt https://github.com/spieglt/winage

- a discussion of the authentication properties of age https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-authentication/

- a discussion of a potential post-quantum plugin https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/post-quantum-age/

- a password-store fork that uses age instead of gpg https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage (see also: how I use it with a YubiKey https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/passage/)

I am using the yubikey plug-in for age (https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey). It creates a private key and writes it to one of the retired PIV slot. What I want to do is to write the same private key to two different Yubikeys.

So with age I can also just use my ssh public key to encrypt and my ssh private key to decrypt my files. If I want to get fancy, I can use something like https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey to provide the key material for my age operations (which should compose with age.el quite well also, i.e. you can have every decrypt operation have a touch requirement in Emacs that way).

> A good feature of PIV applet of Yubikey 5 is that it stores 24 keys.

Note that not all 24 of those keys are suitable for age usage. The 4 main keys have specific usage definitions in the PIV specification that mean hardware tokens alter how those key slots behave. Only one of them (the KeyManagement slot) has a definition that allows encryption, and even that I was somewhat suspicious of overlapping with, as I couldn't predict how those existing keys were being used, and didn't want to support every possible key type that might be in that slot (which users likely wouldn't be able to alter).

age-plugin-yubikey avoids this complexity by only interacting with the 20 "retired" slots, which have no constraining definitions. (I am considering adding restricted support for the KeyManagement slot specifically for CAC card users who aren't allowed to add new keys to their cards [0], but this would be behind a default-off feature flag to keep the primary UX simple.)

[0] https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey/issues/62

We designed the plugin protocol (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 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.

Hardware? I assume if someone was concerned about key access they wouldn't want keys on their filesystem at all but move them into an HSM instead. Since age identities can come from standard input I assume it'd be feasible to put together a workflow there coming from one of the various cli utilities for interacting with keys. There is already a YubiKey specific age plugin [0] getting worked on as well. Currently in beta but looks interesting. Hopefully that will continue to expand to cover other common options. HSM support is pretty important for a modern encryption utility IMO but unfortunately the landscape is pretty all over the place too, so makes sense to just leave it to plugins or as part of a unix flow.

----

0: https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey

age also has a notion of plugins, one of which is age-plugin-yubikey (written in Rust, there is also yubage written in Go) which allows you to create an age identity whose private key is stored via PIV.

Kakoune with LSP (gopls).

You could dive into installing kak-lsp, which will provide the code intelligence features you want. Kakoune doesn't do windowing on it's own, so your going to need to rely on something like tmux or a terminal emulator that does similar, such as wezterm, or even a tiling window manager (which is what is being used in the video). Kakoune really needs a lot of time invested to configure well though.

Why do you need vscode? Kakoune supports code actions, so this should work in the editor with the best editing model ever. See lsp-code-actions from https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp.

In addition, rather than using its own full-fledged programming language for plugins or choosing to use a specific programming language, it provides a limited configuration language that's closer to a domain-specific language and to be used as a "glue" between Kakoune and programs written in any language. For example, the kak-lsp plugin uses a program written in Rust that is integrated with Kakoune with a thin wrapper of Kakoune's configuration language.

If you're having problems with these capabilities, try to look at the kak-lsp debug output: https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp#troubleshooting

kak-lsp doesn't print to *debug* under normal operation. If you want to check on kak-lsp, enable verbose logging as described here and tail -f the log file.

So, since pretty much everything happens through a shell, you can use anything that produces an executable to write your logic. kak-lsp, for example, is written in Rust, with some kakscript to define the commands, hooks and options a user needs to interface with it.