Performance Issues about rage HOT 3 OPEN

The performance problem you are noticing is the cost of running the scrypt PBKDF on the user passphrase, which is automatically set at encryption time to a hardness level of at least 1 second of computation on the current machine (and due to the granularity of the hardness setting could be anywhere between 1 and 2 seconds). This is a security measure used by all password-based encryption mechanisms, and thus you'll likely see the same performance issues with any other library. Additionally, when used this way, the passphrase is run through PBKDF with a unique salt for each encryption (as a defense against security issues related to passphrase reuse), which means the 1-2 seconds of PBKDF cost are paid per row.

[Obligatory "I Am Not Your Cryptographer" disclaimer]

Instead of encrypting every row with the user's passphrase, a more performant approach would be to encrypt every row with a native age key, and encrypt that with the user's passphrase. Then on start, your application could decrypt the native age key into memory, and then use that for on-the-fly encryption and decryption of rows.

from rage.

@str4d is there a way for me to use a "native age key" directly to encrypt a stream of data?

I'll maybe try to make the Stream struct public so it can be reusable for as long as my application is opened.

from rage.

Instead of encrypting every row with the user's passphrase, a more performant approach would be to encrypt every row with a native age key, and encrypt that with the user's passphrase.

I think it's currently impossible to do that right now because StreamWriter::finish() consumes itself after it's used.

from rage.