age-plugin-yubikey is a plugin for age clients
like age and rage,
which enables files to be encrypted to age identities stored on YubiKeys.
On Windows, Linux, and macOS, you can use the pre-built binaries.
If your system has Rust 1.56+ installed (either via rustup or a system
package), you can build directly from source:
cargo install age-plugin-yubikey
Help from new packagers is very welcome.
On non-Windows, non-macOS systems, you need to ensure that the pcscd service
is installed and running. On Debian or Ubuntu, you can do this with:
$ sudo apt-get install pcscd
WSL does not currently provide native support for USB devices. However, Windows binaries installed on the host can be run from inside a WSL environment. This means that you can encrypt or decrypt files inside a WSL environment with a YubiKey:
age-plugin-yubikey on the Windows host.age-plugin-yubikey.exe is available in the WSL environment's
PATH. For default WSL setups, the Windows host's PATH is automatically
added to the WSL environment's PATH (see
this Microsoft blog post
for more details).There are two ways to configure a YubiKey as an age identity. You can run the
plugin binary directly to use a simple text interface, which will create an age
identity file:
$ age-plugin-yubikey
Or you can use command-line flags to programmatically generate an identity and print it to standard output:
$ age-plugin-yubikey --generate \
[--serial SERIAL] \
[--slot SLOT] \
[--name NAME] \
[--pin-policy PIN-POLICY] \
[--touch-policy TOUCH-POLICY]
Once an identity has been created, you can regenerate it later:
$ age-plugin-yubikey --identity [--serial SERIAL] --slot SLOT
The age recipients contained in all connected YubiKeys can be printed on standard output:
$ age-plugin-yubikey --list
To encrypt files to these YubiKey recipients, ensure that age-plugin-yubikey
is accessible in your PATH, and then use the recipients with an age client as
normal (e.g. rage -r age1yubikey1...).
The output of the --list command can also be used directly to encrypt files to
all recipients (e.g. age -R filename.txt).
To decrypt files encrypted to a YubiKey identity, pass the identity file to the
age client as normal (e.g. rage -d -i yubikey-identity.txt).
age-plugin-yubikey does not provide or interact with an agent for decryption.
As age plugin binaries have short lifetimes (they only run while the age client
is running), this means that YubiKey identities configured with a PIN policy of
once will actually prompt for the PIN on every decryption.
A decryption agent will most likely be implemented as a separate age plugin that
interacts with yubikey-agent,
enabling YubiKeys to be used simultaneously with age and SSH.
age-plugin-yubikey only officially supports the following YubiKey variants,
set up either via the text interface or the --generate flag:
NOTE: Nano and USB-C variants of the above are also supported. The pre-YK4 YubiKey NEO series is NOT supported. The blue "Security Key by Yubico" will also not work (as it doesn't support PIV).
In practice, any PIV token with an ECDSA P-256 key and certificate in one of the 20 "retired" slots should work. You can list all age-compatible keys with:
$ age-plugin-yubikey --list-all
age-plugin-yubikey implements several automatic security management features:
age-plugin-yubikey does not support custom management keys.Licensed under either of
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.