A protocol for what? To send messages securely? We have that. To do deduplicated mass backup? That exists, too. To securely transfer files? We have that as well. Each of these problems makes their own demands on cryptography and deserves their own purpose-built cryptosystem, which is why Signal looks like Signal, and not a naive message bus over which we push PGP-encrypted records.
The point of `age` is that when you subtract out all these use cases from PGP and leave just the file encryption problem, PGP still sucks, and sucks way out of proportion to how complicated file encryption is.
So instead of bringing all of PGP's bloat, 1990s cryptography, and misfeatures to bear on that simple problem, we just get a simple, modern tool optimized for that one problem.
> The point of `age` is that when you subtract out all these use cases from PGP and leave just the file encryption problem, PGP still sucks, and sucks way out of proportion to how complicated file encryption is.
`age` is awesome. We wrote something almost identical to `age` internally at Latacora that has some features `age` doesn't have (encrypting optionally to KMS keys, and managing encrypted DMGs), and I'm going to kill that tool off and add those features to a local fork of `age` instead.
The point of `age` is that when you subtract out all these use cases from PGP and leave just the file encryption problem, PGP still sucks, and sucks way out of proportion to how complicated file encryption is.
So instead of bringing all of PGP's bloat, 1990s cryptography, and misfeatures to bear on that simple problem, we just get a simple, modern tool optimized for that one problem.