ezcrypt

Tried box64 on a Raspberry Pi 5 the other day and it worked above expectations. Except for a minor glitch with OGG audio, I got about 60 FPS in Xonotic (x86_64 emulated on AArch64).

For the record: The latest release of ezcrypt (v1.3.0) has poly1305 authentication. Thanks for the feedback!

Very interesting! Thanks for the link, I didn't know about it and I'll have to check it out.

It still falls slightly outside of my zone of preference, though, as it's a .Net application, which limits which platforms it can be run on (I'm aiming for a tool that can readily be used on most of my devices, including on an old Raspberry Pi or a router).

"also known as a dependency" - There are different kinds of dependencies. The ones I'm usually concerned with are the ones that cause you headaches when you try to get the software working on an exotic platform ten years from now. I've developed software for 30+ years, and along the way I have grown a strong disliking to external dependencies (be it Python packages, Boost C++ libraries, 3rd party C libraries or a hefty Mono or Java runtime).

Thanks for the reference to BearSSL - it appears to be very much in line with my own preferred design principles.

If it's the AxCrypt I think it is, it doesn't even run on Linux, never mind Raspberry PI or Milk-V for instance. And it's not free either. So it doesn't meet many of my requirements, unfortunately.

Can you use PGP in the same way (I haven't tried)? Basically, symmetric file encryption based on a secret password and optionally a secret pepper file (effectively a secret key).

No, I realize that (I was thinking that ssh-keygen could be used as a poor-man's authentication for some use cases - basically share a secret between sender & receiver that can be used to ensure that the message has not been tampered with). One of the reasons that I haven't implemented authentication yet is that I want to better understand the differences and nuances of different methods and use cases before deciding on a method. Recommendations are welcome.

age is definitely more mature, and as you say, it should probably say somewhere that ezcrypt is still a hobby project (albeit a serious one).

Some motives (some of which may sound strange, but mattered to me):

  * Completely public domain.
  * Without any third party dependencies (not even openssl or similar).
  * Don't rely on a single cipher (low trust).
  * Extremely portable (should easily build for and run on anything from an M4 Mac to a Raspberry Pi to an old OpenWRT MIPS router with 32 MB RAM for instance).
  * Should be easy to use (e.g. no key management, unless you want to), and composable in standard Unix ways (pipes etc).
  * Security focused, obviously. E.g. software architecture-wise, minimize dependencies, properly manage files, processes and secrets, etc.
  * Personally: To learn and to build something that I trust.

In a way: When the dust settles after the nuclear apocalypse, if you manage to dig out a C compiler, this is your tool. ;-)

This should be the top rated comment ;-) Sorry. I can't remedy the situation for you, though.

The idea isn't really to make the encryption stronger or to widen the key. It's a classical case of trust - if one cipher is compromised, there are others to cover for you. Also, I wanted to learn the different ciphers, and speed wasn't a top priority.