ssh-agent-pkcs11 VS rage

It hasn't been able to do it in a meaningful way.

I've been patching support for this into ssh-agent for about a decade. I wrote a PKCS#11 module which talks to the SSH agent socket to forward your smartcard [0]. Doing so requires three changes to the protocol:

1. The ability to sign arbitrary data and get back the signed result [1]; normally you get back a hashed result [2].

2. The ability to decrypt data, this is what you said. This is less important since many things only require signatures (and not all algorithms support encryption/decryption).

3. The ability to request your certificates [3] [4] this one is kinda obvious.

The benefits of this are that you can use your smartcard on the remote host to do fully authenticated password-less sudo with pam_pkcs11. You can also do anything else that requires you to use your private key to be used, which can include fetching files (TLS client certificate authentication).

Within the US Government, passwords have been being phased out since 2004, but the requirements for authenticated privilege elevation remain.

Another way to accomplish this is to use SSH forwarding of your PC/SC socket but that's less portable and more fragile (and even less secure).

[0] https://github.com/rkeene/ssh-agent-pkcs11

[1] https://cackey.rkeene.org/fossil/artifact/0d0e90bbfdee672c?l...

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-miller-ssh-agent...

[3] https://cackey.rkeene.org/fossil/artifact/0d0e90bbfdee672c?l...

[4] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6187#section-2.1

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