When Pretty Good Privacy Becomes Actually Good Encryption

Is GPG showing its Age?

Well, many cryptography programs become blotted over time, and support an increasing number of cryptography methods, and often struggle to integrate the most up-to-date methods. This has happened with OpenSSL, which supports so many symmetric key, hashing and public key encryption methods. With GPG/PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), we also see many methods.

Can we get a nice and simple encryption method for files which is easy to use and secure? Well, Age (Actually Good Encryption) can provide this [here]. Overall, we see large public keys used in GPP, and where it is fairly cumbersome to use. Along with this, it supports so many methods that can make it confusing to use.

We can either use Python or a command line. First, we will investigate the command line. To generate keys we run the following:

$ age-keygen
# created: 2024-04-02T15:32:10Z
# public key: age1dg6egjq84q22er3w5y47zy4ltjqvjr2yfpqawjk7c6gmq897tsgqacjwtm
AGE-SECRET-KEY-1UG8ZSE0NVJ70TPA2LZ99WGDTGP796W7U94PUXJE262Z6JJJUPAUSEHJVP0

We can see we have a public key of “age1dg6egjq84q22er3w5y47zy4ltjqvjr2yfpqawjk7c6gmq897tsgqacjwtm” and a private of “AGE-SECRET-KEY-1UG8ZSE0NVJ70TPA2LZ99WGDTGP796W7U94PUXJE262Z6JJJUPAUSEHJVP0”. These are relatively small keys…