Having an alternative implementation to GnuPG is a pretty important. Although many would argue against the use of PGP encryption for many use cases such as email, there are other use cases where PGP's ideas have no replacement.<p>For a specific example take signing git commits. Even fossil scm delegates this task to pgp. Personally keybase is the only project that may provide some form of alternative, but they do so by supporting pgp.<p>I definitely agree that PGP was and is no longer the correct tool for every use case as it sort out to be, but I find there are still pockets where PGP has no alternative. I'd be interested what HN's thoughts are on PGP for this specific use case and if there could be an alternative.
As someone who has been trying to use this library but haven't had the time to finish build integration to cross compile for all of my target platforms, I really wish it weren't using nettle, particularly as it is <i>also</i> using openssl :(. Does rust not have useful cryptography libraries yet? Or couldn't it <i>just</i> openssl?
I still use PGP to encrypt files with secrets in them that I am sending to a known source, and I know it's still the base encryption for a few well known file servers. A new player in the market is welcomed.
Here's the command line documentation:<p><a href="https://docs.sequoia-pgp.org/sq/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.sequoia-pgp.org/sq/index.html</a><p>I have to admit that it looks more digestible than gpg's. It seems it's still missing a way to manage OpenPGP smartcards like Yubikeys. Also, I can't see a way to manage an arbitrary set of subkeys for a given primary key.<p>I'm really happy to see an alternative to GnuPG, though. This looks promising.
Off topic af: what does the picture on their landing page symbolize? <a href="https://sequoia-pgp.org/" rel="nofollow">https://sequoia-pgp.org/</a>
What's the threat model?<p>I've looked into the code. It uses Nettle's Curve25519 which seems to be implemented constant-time (assuming ECC mul is using "ecc-mul-g" from which is protected against cache timing attacks because the other ecc-mul implementations are using raw table access.)
IMO, encrypted e-mail is a dead end. Latacora has a good blog post about it that I highly recommend: <a href="https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html" rel="nofollow">https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....</a>