So is this like a encrypt tool where we pass an external key to encrypt and we can use other apps to decrypt since key is not embedded in the tool? Or am I understanding it wrong?

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Fran314 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That is true, but it's not specifically what makes it unique. Most encryption tool (like https://github.com/FiloSottile/age which is what secs-man uses under the hood) do not usually bake in the encryption key, rather they expect you to generate it and provide it.

This is true for secs-man too: when you export it prompts with "Enter passphrase:" and you enter the passphrase (I am considering extending it to read the passphrase from a file or from an environment variable, or piped in from stdin, but I'm still not sure what to think of if from a security standing point and I they don't fit my current use so I don't have it in the current TODO)

What makes it unique is that it can be completely emulated by hand (even though it might be a bit tedious) from just a terminal with bash and age installed. This is explained a bit better in the blog post or in the "philosophy section" of the README, but the main point is that (in my opinion) you should NEVER find yourself vendor-locked-in for any data, in particular for secrets. However, you will always need tools for managing them. My tool is designed to be usable and avoid vendor-lock-in, meaning that even if you lose access to the tool you are not locked out of your tools!

I have probably phrased it better in the linked blog post, I invite you to read it if you're still curious. I'm here for any other question!

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rirze an hour ago | parent [-]

Sincerely, I don't get the motivation for this. It feels like `age` is pulling most of the work I care about. `age` is the only tool here encrypting and decrypting secrets, are you managing the orchestration of secrets with your tool?

	▲	Fran314 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		age is pulling all the encryption work. What the tool does is the import/export managing. First of all, it creates snapshots for each export and it ensures to pull the latest snapshot during import. Also, it manages the hashes of the secrets (created on first export) and of the export, which ensure that the files are not corrupted, so that when I import I can be sure that no bitrot happened and the secrets that get copied on my machine are bit-identical to the ones I exported. That being said, it's true that this is not a lot of work to be pulling. As I wrote in the blog post, this Rust tool could have been a Bash script. However I opted for not-bash because I don't feel particularly comfortable with bash and I like to have types. If I knew Go, it would have been a solid option