I have heard there have been talks to use Age for rclone encryption back end.
Will rclone use Age? Is there much difference anyways, given that rclone already uses NACL xSalsa20-Poly1305?
It’s the same algorithm. But Age apparently has a data format that is nice and adapted for streaming.
I had a little chat with the author of age about this. Rclone crypt is in fact very similar to age - the encrypted data in both is chunked into 64k chunks in a very similar way so they can be streamed.
The differences come in the header which is variable length for age and fixed length for rclone.
A fixed length header for rclone lets rclone calculate the length of the file without having to read anything from it which is super important for filing systems which need to know the size of things.
It would be possible to build an age backend for rclone but it would have the disadvantage that if you did rclone lsl so show sizes of the files, then rclone would have to open each file to read the header from it in order to calculate the size of each file.
Thanks! That clarifies the story!
I guess then Age encryption is mostly as secure as rclone’s encryption (except that the former is heavily advertised!).
Maybe cryptv2 will use age encryption... I'm certainly open to it if we can get fixed sized headers on it somehow.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.