You introduced "short-lived" vs "long-lived", not me. Long-lived as wall-clock time (months, years) is the default interpretation in this context.

The Alice / Bob comparison is asymmetric in a misleading way. You state Bob Ltd retains all private keys indefinitely. A Heartbleed-style attack on their key storage infrastructure still compromises 30 years of backups, not 90 days. Rotation only helps if only the current operational key is exposed, which is an optimistic threat model you did not specify.

Additionally, your symmetric key point actually supports what I said. If data is encrypted with ephemeral symmetric keys and the asymmetric key only wraps those, the long-lived asymmetric key's exposure does not enable bulk decryption without obtaining each wrapped key individually.

> "There is no way to securely satisfy your use case"

No need to be so dismissive. Personal backup encryption with a long-lived key, passphrase-protected private key, and offline storage is a legitimate threat model. Real-world systems validate this: SSH host keys, KMS master keys, and yes, even PGP, all use long-lived asymmetric keys for confidentiality in non-ephemeral contexts.

And to add to this, incidentally, age (the tool you mentioned) was designed with long-lived recipient keys as the expected use case. There is no built-in key rotation or expiry mechanism because the authors considered it unnecessary for file encryption. If long-lived keys for confidentiality were inherently problematic, age would be a flawed design (so you might want to take it up with them, too).

In any case, yeah, your point about high-fan-out keys with large blast radius is correct. That is different from "long-lived keys are bad for confidentiality" (see above with regarding to "age").

An intended use case for FOKS (https://foks.pub) is to allow long-lived durable shared secrets between users and teams with key rotation when needed.

>Personal backup encryption with a long-lived key, passphrase-protected private key, and offline storage is a legitimate threat model

... If you're going to use a passphrase anyway why not just use a symmetric cipher?

In fact for file storage why not use an encrypted disk volume so you don't need to use PGP?