[HN Gopher] Passage: A fork of password-store that uses age inst... ___________________________________________________________________ Passage: A fork of password-store that uses age instead of GnuPG Author : Shank Score : 43 points Date : 2021-12-17 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | creamytaco wrote: | No thanks, I'll stick with GnuPG. | dang wrote: | " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other | people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._" | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | jrootabega wrote: | I'm guessing you probably have something say about the | criticisms of GnuPG, which would be good to talk about IMO. | aranw wrote: | Why stick with GnuPG? | | I'm also interested in trying to understand why use age instead | of GnuPG? | zahllos wrote: | The main argument in favour of age is that it only does one | thing: encrypting files, and does it 'well' in the sense | there is no need to edit your gnupg config file to exclude | all the crypto from the 90s that your version of gnupg might | decide to default to. | | This makes things significantly simpler in terms of the code | for age, which reduces the possible bugs and possible misuse. | | GnuPG is more versatile and tries to solve a number of | (arguably, orthogonal) problems, including signing and | authentication (by users and also of keys in the web of | trust). This leads to more complexity, and some parts, e.g. | the web of trust, can't really be described as being a | success. Others, such as sign and encrypt, likely don't | achieve semantic security (also the case in SMIME / CMS, and | I'm not sure if this has ever been fixed) and definitely | don't achieve the forward/future secrecy guarantees of say | Signal. Age isn't trying to be a messenger, so it doesn't | need to worry about this. | | It comes down to this: if you use AES-Something with GnuPG or | you use ChaCha20-Poly1305 with Age, it is unlikely ever to be | meaningfully broken in our lifetimes (including if you are | currently 1 day old and including by quantum computers) and | everything will be fine. But age will only use | ChaCha20-Poly1305, and the format is pretty simple, while | GnuPG can be convinced to decrypt CAST5 encrypted messages | and has a much more complex format that introduces a greater | risk of binary parser vulnerabilities. | | Age is written in Go (there's also Rage, written in Rust), | whereas GnuPG is a big old ball of C, so if there are parser | bugs, GnuPG is bad news and Go/Rust are likely hopefully | sound. | upofadown wrote: | >...while GnuPG can be convinced to decrypt CAST5 encrypted | messages... | | That's not actually a problem. The problem would be if it | could be convinced to _encrypt_ CAST5 messages. Assuming | that _is_ actually a problem. Is there anything | particularly wrong with CAST5 other than the block size? | hkt wrote: | Not going to use it (I already use pass) but this is great and | I'm glad there is another option out there for people. | atweiden wrote: | See also: https://git.sr.ht/~gpanders/passage | endymi0n wrote: | > The age backend is an experimental crypto backend [for gopass] | based on age. It adds an encrypted keyring on top (using age in | scrypt password mode). It also has (largely untested) support for | specifying recipients as github users. This will use their ssh | public keys for age encryption. It is well positioned to | eventually replace gpg as the default crypto backend. | | https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass/blob/master/docs/backends... | ayushnix wrote: | It would be better if the age specific code could be included | upstream. This should, however, serve as a good point of | reference. | toomanymike wrote: | Many useful patches are posted to the upstream pass mailing | list. They're rarely responded to. I don't know if that | specifically drove the creation of this fork, but it's | absolutely a frustration as a pass user ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-17 23:00 UTC)