agebox

agebox

Easy and simple file repository encryption tool based on Age.

Have you ever thought “this should be simple” while you were using tools like Blackbox , Git-crypt or Sops? This is what agebox is. A tool on top of Age’s security system that encrypts/decrypts your repository files, focused on simplicity and gitops.

Features

• Secure (Agebox delegates security to Age).
• Tracks encrypted files in repository.
• No PGP and no agents, just simple SSH and Age key files.
• File flexibility (encrypts/decrypts recursive paths, multiple/single files, all tracked files…).
• Reencrypts all tracked files with a single command.
• Focused on Gitops, CI flows and simplicity.
• Works with any file (doesn’t understand formats like JSON, YAML…).
• Single binary/executable.
• No side effects like VCS commands (e.g: doesn’t execute Git commands for you).

Get agebox

• Releases
• Docker images
• git clone [email protected]:slok/agebox.git && cd ./agebox && make build && ls -la ./bin

Getting started

Initialize agebox tracking file.

agebox init

Encrypt (and track) multiple files.

agebox encrypt ./app1/secret1.yaml ./app2/secret1.yaml

Encrypt (and track) a directory in dry-run to see what would be encrypted before doing it.

agebox encrypt ./secrets --dry-run

Encrypt (and track) a directory and only (filter regex used) the secret named yaml files.

agebox encrypt ./manifests --filter ".*secret(\.yaml|\.yml)$"

Decrypt a subset of tracked secrets and a file.

agebox decrypt ./secrets/team-1 ./secrets/secret1.yaml

Decrypt only (filter regex used) team-a tracked files.

agebox decrypt ./secrets --filter ".*team-a.*"

Force decryption of all tracked files.

agebox decrypt --all --force

Validate tracked secrets are encrypted and not decrypted (without decrypt validation).

agebox validate --no-decrypt

Cat multiple encrypted files and print them to stdout.

agebox cat ./secrets/secret1.yaml.agebox ./secrets/secret2.json.agebox --no-log

Reencrypt all files.

agebox reencrypt

Untrack multiple files.

agebox untrack ./secrets/secret1.yaml ./secrets/secret2.yaml

Untrack and delete file.

agebox untrack ./secrets/secret1.yaml --delete

How does it work

When you initialize agebox on a repository it will create a file (.ageboxreg.yml) that will track all the encrypted files in the repository.

From now on if you encrypt files with agebox from the root of the repository it will:

• Track the files if not already tracked.
• Encrypt the files with the public keys in ./keys or --public-keys as recipients.
• If is a directory it will expand to all the files in the directory and subdirectories.

As a regular flow of agebox usage examples, you can:

• Decrypt tracked files as a single file, multiple files, a directory and its subdirectories…
• Decrypt all tracked files (--all).
• Reencrypt all tracked files with the public key recipients.
• Encrypt all tracked files (--all) that are decrypted in the repository.
• Untrack a file (and optionally delete from the file system).
• Encrypt/decrypt in dry-run to validate (handy en CI for checking).
• Cat encrypted files to stdout.
• Validate tracked files are encrypted and not decrypted (useful on CI, git hooks…).

Check the Getting started section for specific commands.

Keys

Agebox supports the same asymmetric keys Age does:

• X25519 (Age).
• RSA SSH.
• Ed25519 SSH.

Agebox knows how to discover keys in directories (recursively).

Public keys

The public keys are the recipients of the encrypted files. With their respective private keys, users will be able to decrypt the files.

Public keys should be on a directory relative to the root of the repository (by default ./keys) at the moment of invoking encryption commands, this simplifies the usage of keys by not requiring pgp keys or agents.

Agebox will encrypt with the loaded public keys, this means that when we add or remove any public key we should reencrypt the tracked files.

In case you don’t want to have all the public keys in all the repositories that are managed by agebox, you could centralize these keys in another repository andgetting them before invoking agebox. Some usage examples:

• Git submodule git pull --recurse-submodules.
• Git repo and previous agebox command invoke git clone/pull.
• Download public keys from S3.

You can configure this with --public-keys flag or AGEBOX_PUBLIC_KEYS env var.

You can have multiple public keys in a file (one per line), like Age recipients file.

Private keys

By default Agebox will try loading all the valid private keys from HOME/.ssh, however you can configure this with --private-keys flag or AGEBOX_PRIVATE_KEYS env var to point to specific directory with the keys (or a path to a single key).

Alternatives

• Blackbox: Uses PGP (requires an agent), complex and sometimes has undesired side effects (e.g git commands execution).
• Sops: Lots of features and very complex for simple use cases.
• Git-crypt: Uses PGP (requires an agent), complex, 100% tied to Git.

Kudos

Thanks to @FiloSottile, @Benjojo12 and all the other contributors of Age.

Without Age, Agebox would not exist.