passage VS C2SP

passage

_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/)

https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage and https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage/issues/24

Without looking close at your suggestion, you might want to look at passage [0] by the creator of age. It's a fork of pass [1] using age as the backend.

[0] https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage

I wanted to reduce the amount of key management in my life to the bare minimum. I don't use gpg for its intended purpose (maintaining a web of trust with folks that you communicate with), but rather only use it for Emacs file encryption and things like password-store (which I'm replacing with https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage and will also port the Emacs pass frontend to work with).

there in fact exists a pass-like interface for age: https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage

Age is a modern, respected crypto solution: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/age.md

Argon2 is the best choice, but scrypt may be more easily available: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/issues/10

Hi! I read and appreciated your issues and discussions, sorry I didn't get to respond to them yet, but I've been thinking about it.

Although I don't disagree that parsing text is hard, I also think that parsing variable-size binary formats is hard (and there is a tall, tall pile of bugs to confirm that). Really, parsing is hard. Rather than count on one design or the other to be bug-proof, I worked on a large test suite to help implementations catch their parsing bugs. [https://c2sp.org/CCTV/age] I think it would have found one of the issues you reported if that implementation had integrated it, and I am going to add vectors for various resource exhaustion scenarios which I hope would have found the other. (I am not going to look at what it is exactly, so I will know if I made the suite comprehensive enough without being too specific about this bug.)

I also liked your observation that it would have been nice if the header was streamable. [https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/issues/28] It went on the pile labeled "regrets / for v2 when it comes", thank you.

I think it's ironic that you imply a "dozen of immature crypto libraries" are used in the Age spec. It's quite the opposite and the Age spec provides a reduction in so-called "yolo crypto" versus the OpenPGP spec. See: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/age.md and also give https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html# for a pretty accurate overview of what's wrong with OpenPGP.

… okay, then look at the spec, which is beautifully simple: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/age.md#the-scrypt-rec...

I had the same question. I believe it refers to “Actually Good Encryption” (https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/age.md).