Age Encryption GUI Recommendations?

General
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I’ve been curious about using age so I’m curious if anyone knows any good GUIs for it? I’m mainly looking for Linux, Windows, and Android.

A few I found are Mage for android, for windows there’s winage which is starred on age’s “awesome-age” list, but is probably abandoned. Another that’s cross platform for desktop, but seems to have no eyes on it at all, and be coded at least in part by Claude is Encryptor. Another which may be abandoned but is cross platform is chiffrage. Finally age gui which relies on having the normal age installed to work.

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awesome-age also links to a couple in-browser implementations that work cross-platform

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For Windows why not just use the CLI tool? A GUI will add attack surface and a trusted party and seems unnecessary considering how simple the age CLI tool is to use.

For Android I understand the need for a GUI, but it also seems you’ve already found one that will work?

1 Like
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Yeah, I saw those but I’m not sure how comfortable I am using a website for it. I do see that they’re supposed to be completely offline though.

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I probably should just figure out how to use the CLI. I would definitely prefer a GUI for ease of use, but that may be asking too much with how few there seem to be. Especially ones that are actively maintained/trustworthy if they even use the latest version of age or support yubikeys. Sidenote would I be correct in assuming swapping out the Fedora install commands dnf with rpm-ostree should work for atomic distros?

Yeah, I’ll probably stick with Mage. It’s a nice app, and it’s from one of the contributors to Kage which is listed on awesome-age. They also seem to be working on adding post-quantum. Hopefully something for yubikey support too soon.

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For pc, you use the cli tool. You can write a bash script or some thing to automate you workflow.

For android, its kind of tricky.

You can use termux, pkg install age, trusted version.

But typing commands in that tiny keyboard is a nuisance and you cant automate everything.

There are a bunch of apps and browser versions but they are limited. They dont implement the two killer features of age:

  • pq crypto
  • ssh keys

Currenty the best gui for android is GitHub - norsehorse-dev/AgePonyAndroid: Kotlin implementation of the age encryption protocol for Android, with SSH key support. Encrypt and decrypt files locally — no servers, no accounts. · GitHub. But buyer beware

  • one solo dude is doing all the pony apps
  • they seem heavily, heavily vibecoded
  • like, even the readme.md and the docs site reads like aislop
  • dude seems solid from his interactions in issues

I did testrun this for a week, it seems fine, it uses no data to dial home, and so. It seems fine for encrypting stuff to send to other users.

I would advise you to a least not use your private “real” keys on ponyage.

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I saw those, but I agree they all seem heavily vibecoded and only popped up all at the same time very recently.

For android I think I’ll stick with Mage especially since they’re working on adding PQ, among a couple other things now Pull requests · android-password-store/kage · GitHub . Hopefully they’ll add yubikey support as well at some point.

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yeah, the mage client seems better overall.

but id advise you to keep a “real set” of keys in age command line only.

maybe they will add hybrid mlkemx25519 support to gnupg and maybe we will get a decent mobile client.

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I haven’t properly started using age, but my ideal would be that age-yubikey-plugin adds PQ and Mage adds yubikey support, (or at least yubikey recipient [age1yubikey1..] support) so that my private keys live exclusively on the yubikeys.

Especially considering that Mage now has PQ I wouldn’t use GnuPG.

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I read about it.

is there a yubikey or any other key that already has support for hybrid pq keys?

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I think yubikeys on firmware 5.7.x or above will work, but it’s just that age-plugin-yubikey doesn’t support it yet. They also don’t support AES for PIV slot yet, only TDES. I think they might just be waiting on some dependencies to get updated because rage also doesn’t have PQ yet and it’s the same dev both written in Rust. I’d recommend taking a look through some of the open issues/pull-requests to maybe get a better idea GitHub - str4d/age-plugin-yubikey: YubiKey plugin for age · GitHub