rage VS RustCrypto

I have already built this into a small feature in my app, but I do plan to integrate it deeper and bake it into the core functionality soon. Which should be another interesting problem to solve as the app has integrated client-side encryption using Age (rage (rage-wasm)). But that's for another day...

_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 just added rage (https://github.com/str4d/rage) support, which does support pinentry, see https://github.com/anticomputer/age.el#known-issues for an example of how to use rage instead.

Really appreciate this article. It's a little snarky but it hits the mark and encourages people to try Age, which is a pretty awesome little tool.

https://age-encryption.org/v1

I'm not convinced that whole-disk encryption is sensible for most threat models, but I use the built-in FileVault on macOS (under the reasoning that, at the very least, it can't really hurt).

On Linux, I use age[1] (specifically, rage[2]) to encrypt sensitive files. I wrote a secret manager that uses the latter as an encryption backend[3], and I use `rage-mount` to mount (read-only) views of encrypted archives.

[1]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

[2]: https://github.com/str4d/rage

[3]: https://github.com/woodruffw/kbs2

I will admit that the "market" for this software is relatively saturated, that's why Dexios aims to stand out. Everything of interest is covered in the documentation, and the codebase itself is relatively easy to read (trying to understand the source of a tool such as rage will probably give headaches).

Anyone have any thoughts on choosing between this and rage?

I would say a toy (or personal-use-only) password manager is a relatively simple project. If we are to forget about the GUI parts, you need to determine serialization of your password database (bincode + serde should be enough) and how to encrypt it. For the latter you need only two algorithms: a password hash for deriving encryption key from password and optional salt (the latter is usually randomly generated and stored as a "key file"), and an AEAD algorithm for encrypting and decrypting serialized database. There are certain pitfalls with encryption (e.g. you should not reuse nonce with the same key, especially with modes like GCM) and with properly erasing sensitive data from memory, as well as preventing it from leaking to things like swap, but learning about those is part of the learning experience.

FYI: the rust-crypto crate is unmaintained. Take a look at https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs instead

Dexios is a secure command-line encryption tool, that uses audited crates provided by the RustCrypto Team.

I choose an AEDS crate from the RustCrypto group: AES-GCM in its SIV variant (the SIV variant isn't really needed but it doesn't cost much).

Use RustCrypto's aes with one of its block modes (https://docs.rs/block-modes/latest/block_modes/) or AEAD algorithms (https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs). There's a lot of modular stuff in RustCrypto, just need to browse a little 😉.

crypto_secretbox: https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs/tree/master/xsalsa20poly1305

I'd recommend https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs. RustCrypto's crates are high quality, widely used and some have even been audited. Unfortunately they don't provide a read/write interface.