sigtool VS rage

I recently came across sigtool[1] which on the surface looks like a slightly more well defined tool/format for encryption than age[2].

And they both attempt to be simpler, more modern than gnupg[3] and easier to use than eg: openssl[4].

Which tool do you use/recommend for encrypting files, and why?

My primary use case is for backups - but interested in other use-cases as well.

[1] https://github.com/opencoff/sigtool

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

[3] https://gnupg.org/

[4] https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Enc

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