age File Encryption Tool

age is a simple, modern, and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library. Created by Filippo Valsorda (a cryptography engineer who previously worked on the Go team at Google and Go's crypto packages) in 2019, age has over 18,000 stars as of 2026. age was designed to replace GPG for file encryption with a tool that is simpler, more secure, and easier to use correctly, avoiding the footguns and complexity that have plagued GPG for decades. Key features include: X25519 key pairs (generating and using modern elliptic curve X25519 key pairs for encryption, with keys represented as short, human-readable bech32-encoded strings), passphrase-based encryption (encrypting files with a passphrase using scrypt for key derivation, for cases where key management is impractical), SSH key support (encrypting files to SSH public keys, allowing recipients to decrypt using their existing SSH private keys via the age-keygen and age commands), multiple recipients (encrypting a single file to multiple recipients, any of whom can decrypt with their respective key), armored output (optional ASCII-armored PEM-style output for embedding in text-based formats like email and chat), streaming encryption (encrypting and decrypting streams without buffering the entire file in memory, enabling encryption of arbitrarily large files and pipes), age format specification (a well-documented, minimal file format that is easy to audit and implement, with reference implementations in Go, Rust, Python, and JavaScript), age-keygen (a companion tool for generating age key pairs), identity files (storing multiple age identities in a single file for key management), plugin system (supporting hardware security keys and custom key types via the age plugin protocol, including YubiKey and PIV smart card integration), rage (a community-maintained Rust implementation of the age tool with full CLI compatibility), and integration with git for encrypted secrets in repositories.