age.
A small, modern file encryption format built around one job: encrypt a file to a recipient, decrypt it with an identity. No keyrings, no web of trust, no configuration — just strong defaults that are hard to misuse.
age (“Actually Good Encryption”) is a file encryption format and command-line tool designed by Filippo Valsorda. It encrypts a file to one or more recipient public keys, producing an .age file that only the matching identities can open.
What it is
age is deliberately minimal. A recipient is a short public key like age1ql3z… or an SSH public key. An identity is the matching secret. You encrypt to recipients, you decrypt with identities. That is the whole mental model.
Under the hood, every age file uses X25519 for key agreement and ChaCha20-Poly1305 for the actual payload encryption. There is no algorithm negotiation and no cipher suite to choose, which removes a whole category of downgrade and misconfiguration problems.
Why it matters
PGP accumulated decades of options, key types, and trust machinery. age throws that out and ships one strong path. The format is small enough to audit, the tooling is consistent across platforms, and the output is byte-for-byte identical whether it comes from the age CLI, a Go library, or AgePony on your phone.
An age recipient is a short bech32 string. The encrypted file can be raw binary or ASCII-armored like the block above.
Related terms
Common questions.
Is age a replacement for PGP?
For file encryption, largely yes. age covers encrypt, decrypt, and (via SSHSIG) signing. It does not do encrypted email inline or OpenPGP keyservers — if you need those, see PGPony, AgePony's sister app.
Does AgePony produce standard age files?
Yes. AgePony is bit-compatible with the reference age tool. Anything it writes, the CLI reads.
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