UX: Unusable for multiple (asynchronous) file encryption / decryption about rage HOT 2 CLOSED

The reason for the memory usage spike is that passphrase encryption is intentionally memory-hard, to help make the passphrase difficult to brute-force. Rather than trying to use the same passphrase on every file, I'd recommend a tiered approach:

• Generate an age identity and recipient for the user.
• Encrypt the age identity using an age passphrase.

Individual files are encrypted to the user's age recipient, and the encrypted files are uploaded along with the encrypted identity. As a neat side-effect, the user doesn't need their passphrase to encrypt their files (but if you wanted this to be "required" then just don't store the age recipient, requiring the user to download and decrypt their age identity to re-derive the recipient).

To decrypt multiple files, the user first downloads and decrypts their age identity using their passphrase, and then uses that to decrypt the individual files. The memory-hard step then only happens once, no matter how many files are being decrypted. Once finished, the user can forget about the age identity, because they can always re-download and re-decrypt as long as they remember their passphrase.

from rage.

Thanks! Your approach seems reasonable :)

from rage.