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by woodruffw 435 days ago
The more general version of this is probably sops[1].

(A general problem with these kinds of “wrap GPG” tools is that you end up with “mystery meat” encryption/signatures: your tool’s security margin is at the mercy of GPG’s opaque and historically not very good defaults.)

[1]: https://github.com/getsops/sops

3 comments

This is 13 lines of Bash plus GPG which is available ~everywhere and a pretty lowish level Linux dependency. SOPS is +20KLOC of Go with support for cloud KMS etc etc. I think you got your mystery meat analogy backwards.
The mystery meat in question is GPG, not sops or this.

(I also wouldn’t call GPG a low level dependency.)

lowish. Meaning if you run a Linux desktop env with a mild amount of software installed it's likely pulled in already.
I’ve used a Linux desktop for my entire adult life, and I’m pretty sure GPG has never been bundled directly with my environment. I used to install it directly, but I haven’t needed that in years either since everything I needed GPG for (= git) supports SSH signing instead.
So is Perl, that doesn’t make it a good argument to use it still for the same reasons.
Perl is horrible, but for one-liners it's strictly less horrible than either sed or awk, which people still use because they are less horrible than pure Bourne shell for some common tasks.
GPG man page is long. But to be fair, GPG, which I have used for decades, has never failed me.
I didn't know about sops, thanks for sharing!

Encrypting YAML files' values may be handy for another project - will take note of it.