Supporting open source
If you’re familiar with Charm tools, you’ll know we love SSH.
Filippo casually maintains the cryptography packages that ship as
part of the Go standard library. This includes our beloved
golang.org/x/crypto/ssh, crypto/ed25519, and age packages.
Insanely impressive!
We’re thrilled to support his work on these open source packages that are so critical for us.
Becoming a full-time open source maintainer…at scale
Instant noodles not required
Filippo is revolutionizing what it means to be an open source maintainer by finding creative ways to make this line of work sustainable…and it’s working!
So well, in fact, that he’s expanding his operation into
a firm of full-time independent open source maintainers, known collectively as
Geomys. First on the roster are Nicola Murino,
who is the dedicated maintainer for golang.org/x/crypto/ssh, and
Dominik Honnef who maintains staticcheck and
gotraceui.
We’re proud and honored to support him and Geomys on their journey while they support our team with their vast knowledge of cryptography and Go expertise. In working with Geomys, we are maximizing our potential by connecting with the maintainers of tools we depend on and love.
You can hear the entire story in his own words over on his blog.
Encrypted files with SSH keys?!
$ age -R ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub example.jpg > example.jpg.age
$ age -d -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 example.jpg.age > example.jpg
Behind the scenes, we’ve been honing Charm’s encryption tooling. Naturally,
this brought us to age, a file encryption tool, format, and Go
library built by @FiloSottile and friends.
SSH
We love finding creative ways to use the SSH protocol (see wish,
melt, wishlist). This is why age really stands out to us.
It supports encrypting files to SSH public keys (both ssh-rsa and
ssh-ed25519) which can then be decrypted with their corresponding private
keys. Hello?! That is so cool. We’re all totally geeking out over here.
This also means it’s suddenly convenient to encrypt documents for non-GPG users, for example, after yoinking SSH public keys from a GitHub profile like so.
$ curl https://github.com/benjojo.keys | age -R - example.jpg > example.jpg.age
File encryption beyond GPG
When people think file encryption, GnuPG is typically what comes to mind. Given this, let’s compare GnuPG and age. There was a discussion about it on GitHub, but I’ll give you the summary.
Age makes it easy to encrypt using common best practices as these are defined by the age developers as defaults. GnuPG requires the user to be more aware of these best practices to get the right results with the tool. If you don’t know much about which encryption protocols to use depending on the context, no worries, age gives you training wheels so you can’t fall off the cryptographic bike.
We’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself if you’re ready to be an age superfan.
Additional reading (for the nerds)
Whatcha think?
Have some feedback on this post? We’d love to hear. Let us know in Discord or via email at vt100@charm.sh.