Charly's Column – Age
Charly's Column – Age
Charly makes life easier for himself by using the lean Age tool for command-line data encryption tasks.
Age (think "aghe" in "spaghetti") promises an uncomplicated approach to encrypting and decrypting files. Written in Go, both the source code and precompiled binaries for various platforms can be found on GitHub [1]. I tried Age on a Raspberry Pi, but the tool also runs on Linux on a PC, macOS, and Windows. The author says the current release from mid-June 2021 is "maybe actually the last v1.0.0 release candidate."
Age supports two ways to encrypt and decrypt files. With the first option, you can create a key file (Age calls this an identity file) based on SSH keys with whose contents you then encrypt the data. In contrast to SSH, this is a symmetrical procedure, so the same file is also used for decryption.
As a second option, Age lets you use a passphrase to encrypt the data. This has the advantage that you can think up a new passphrase for each encryption process. A person you trust and give a passphrase to can use it to decrypt your data – but only the data you encrypted with precisely that one passphrase.
Let's look at both methods. By way of an example, I copied the file /etc/passwd
to my home directory and will now encrypt it using both methods in turn. For the key file method, I need to generate the key file first – I can do this with age-keygen
(Figure 1).

The next step is to encrypt the passwd
file with the key I just generated (Listing 1, line 2). This creates the encrypted passwd.age
file. To decrypt it, use the command from the line 3 of Listing 1.
Listing 1
Key Method
01 $ age-keygen -o age-key.txt 02 $ age --encrypt -i age-key.text -o passwd.age ./passwd 03 $ age --decrypt -i age-key.text -o passwd passwd.age
Now I'll do the same thing but with the passphrase method. Again, I encrypt the passwd
file and give it the name passwd.age
. After the corresponding call shown in line 1 of Listing 2, Age asks me for the desired passphrase. If I don't enter one, the tool generates one itself. Decryption works in the same way, but you can leave out the --passphrase
parameter here (line 4).
Listing 2
Passphrase Method
01 $ age --passphrase -o passwd.age passwd 02 Enter passphrase (leave empty to autogenerate a secure one): 03 Using the autogenerated passphrase "release-response-step-brand-wrap-ankle-pair-unusual-sword-train". 04 $ age --decrypt -o passwd passwd.age 05 Enter passphrase:
The entire procedure's security relies, of course, on careful handling of the key or the passphrase.
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