enchive | Encrypted personal archives | Encryption library

This tool will never achieve critical mass, so what's the point?. Enchive doesn't need to interact with any other systems or people, so there's no need for critical mass, nor that there are any other users. Why can't you use an existing/established tool instead?. I'm not aware of any tool that does everything Enchive does. GnuPG comes close, but doesn't support deriving a key pair from a passphrase. If you're aware of an equal or better tool, please let me know. Isn't it dangerous to derive a key pair from a passphrase?. It is when it's done incorrectly. However, Enchive uses a memory-hard key derivation scheme that makes cracking passphrases very expensive — prohibitively so for any decent passphrase. This is because anyone who has access to even a single encrypted file can mount an offline attack. Deriving asymmetric keys from a passphrase is a standard practice in the Bitcoin world: brainwallets. The caveat is that the passphrase must be sufficiently long, preferably chosen by a computer or with dice. When generating a master key, Enchive's default configuration is extremely paranoid. It would be far cheaper to break into your home and perform an evil maid attack than it would be to crack even a short passphrase. This is not the weak point. Shouldn't the initialization vector (IV) be generated randomly?. The purpose of an IV is to allow the same key to be safely used multiple times. This is particularly important when the same key is derived on different occasions by Diffie-Hellman between the same key pair. Enchive generates a random ephemeral key pair each time a file is encrypted, so the IV is unnecessary. Since ChaCha20 requires an IV regardless, Enchive simply uses the hash of the key. This has the additional effect of allowing the client to verify its symmetric key before beginning decryption. Otherwise a wrong key would only be detected by the MAC after decryption has completed. I'm getting the error "Value too large for defined data type.".