Marcus AdamsSo I think moving forward I'm switching to #AGE for file #encryption instead of #PGP. I occasionally make backup archives of various things and use passphrase encryption with #GPG to encrypt them before storing them. However, GPG is very slow for bigger files, and in some testing recently I discovered AGE is multiple times faster. Also, with their latest release they now support hybrid post #quantum assymmetric key pairs. So for encryption it can fully replace GPG.
It's Friday so I finally got time to sit down and do some of these benchmarks for comparing #GPG and #AGE for #encryption speed. Here's the results so far on an uncompressed .tar file, and an already compressed .tar.zst file. Gonna try to add SequoiaPGP to the list, if I can figure out how to do symmetric/password encryption with it.
Bruce Walzer 🇨🇦@gerowen For GPG, does the platform have AES-NI instructions? Is GPG doing OCB, OCFB-MDC or OCFB mode?
@upofadown I finished writing everything down and have posted it here. GPG, as far as I can tell, doesn't explicitly tell you what mode it's using. All I ever see it say is "AES256", though I believe it defaults to CFB these days. I'm not a cryptographer though, so you can probably glean more information than I just by looking at my setup and results.
Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/gerowen/p/age-vs-gpg-pgp-encryption
@gerowen You can apparently force OCB on. So:
gpg --force-ocb --no-compress -c totc.txt
I used pgpdump to look at the result and it said the mode was 20, which sounds right for GPG OCB. GPG should really let you know what mode you are using as there are now different non-interoperable versions of OCB around due to the standards schism.
I found it interesting that GPG encryption took longer than GPG decryption. CFB mode doesn't parallelize for encryption but can be done in parallel for decryption. I wonder if that is coming out here. Having something better than CFB mode for performance is an important reason OCB mode exists.
@upofadown And yes, the CPU has hardware accelerated AES instruction sets available, and listed in /proc/cpuinfo.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/8000-series/amd-ryzen-9-8945hs.html