[nullc]

Indeed. And the readme and the usage output makes no mention of streaming, buffering, on-line, authentication, or anything related.

This is a potential security relevant behavior that most users-- who haven't written or analyzed tools like this-- would find surprising.

For those following along, I went and tested it-- since the behavior wasn't documented or clear from the code. If it encounters midstream corruption it truncates the output, exits with a non-zero return and prints some error text std stderr: "Error: chacha20poly1305: message authentication failed\n[ Did age not do what you expected? Could an error be more useful? Tell us: https://filippo.io/age/report ]"

If the input is truncated, it either does that-- or if the truncation is on a block boundary it prints "Error: unexpected EOF\n[ Did age not do what you expected? Could an error be more useful? Tell us: https://filippo.io/age/report ]" instead.

It's not a problem, but it should be documented.

[mike_hock]

This is a security footgun and a vulnerability waiting to happen, but bash is at fault, not age. age does the best it can do (while maintaining O(1) memory requirement) by exiting non-zero, but the shell swallows that if it's in the middle of a pipeline.

[labawi]

IMHO it's not that bad. It's actually quite usable, and reasonably easy to handle safely.

Use

  bash: set -eu -o pipefail
  # unfortunately pipefail is not POSIX

and some care when writing scripts. Possibly decrypt to a file first.

A proper and likely footgun would be decrypting and passing tainted plaintext and only then exiting nonzero. E.g.

  decrypt < file | sh  # owned

Definitely should be documented either way.

[mike_hock]

I agree with all of what you said.

The footgun you described can still happen if there's a verification error somewhere in the middle. You could still conceivably craft exploits using only truncation of the plaintext, depending on the situation.

No one should "decrypt < file | sh" (or anything | sh without verifying), but they will. Doesn't matter if we have POSIX or non-POSIX shell flags that can fix it, the defaults are bad.

There's nothing tools like age can do about that, though.

Edit: I was thinking more along the lines of

    if decrypt < file | postprocess > tempfile
    then
        sh tempfile
    fi

where postprocess exits zero. This is where the default shell behavior fails. The "decrypt < file | sh" antipattern is something not even the shell can do anything about.

[labawi]

> No one should "decrypt < file | sh" (or anything | sh without verifying)

I was thinking of self-prepared scripts, tooling or owner controller distribution. Decrypt+good signature is precisely what I want.

Anyway, as nmadden pointed out, age does not provide source authentication duh. AFAIU that means, all the streaming semantics and blockwise AEAD are practically useless, unless you are using the password encryption, which is helpfully blocked from automation.

[dllthomas]

> The "decrypt < file | sh" antipattern is something not even the shell can do anything about.

It could refuse to accept input from stdin if it's not a terminal.

[Boulth]

> If it encounters midstream corruption it truncates the output, exits with a non-zero return and prints some error text std stderr:

Do you mean it releases output even if the encrypted file is corrupt or tampered with? Isn't this one of the issues in e-fail?

[AgentME]

I think the problem with e-fail was that gpg would output data before verifying it. Age will only output chunks of data after they've been verified.