age

age (actually good encryption) is a modern, simple, and secure file encryption tool and format designed by Filippo Valsorda, who is a former Google security engineer and member of the Go cryptography team. The project was created in 2019 as a reaction against the complexity and historical baggage of existing encryption tools like GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and OpenSSL. GPG, while powerful, is notorious for its confusing command-line interface, sprawling feature set, and decades of accumulated complexity that makes it easy for even experienced users to make security mistakes. age takes the opposite approach: it provides a minimal, opinionated, and hard-to-misuse API with no configuration options that could weaken security. The core design principles are: no configuration files or options that could compromise security (no cipher selection, no key size options, no mode of operation choices), keys are small and easy to manage (SSH key format or age's native key format), recipients and identities are clearly separated, and the output format is deterministic and non-malleable. age uses X25519 (Curve25519 ECDH) for key exchange, ChaCha20-Poly1305 for authenticated encryption, and HKDF-SHA256 for key derivation. For SSH key support, age can encrypt files to any SSH public key (ed25519 and RSA) and decrypt with the corresponding private key. The project also includes rage, a Rust implementation maintained by str4d, and provides a plugin system for alternative recipient types like hardware security keys (YubiKey via age-plugin-yubikey), GitHub identities (age-plugin-github), and Amazon KMS. As of 2026, age has over 18,000 GitHub stars.