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str4d
age-plugin-yubikey
Rust2021–2026
str4d / age-plugin-yubikey

age-plugin-yubikey

YubiKey plugin for age

Command LineSecurity & Privacy
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
11Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

YubiKey plugin for age

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:36:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year17 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-09-06 21:55:33 UTC to 2026-04-06 21:19:42 UTC.

02462021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

6 sources
str4d·Jun 11, 2022
> A good feature of PIV applet of Yubikey 5 is that it stores 24 keys. Note that not all 24 of those keys are suitable for age usage. The 4 main keys have specific usage definitions in the PIV specification that mean hardware tokens alter how those key slots behave. Only one of them (the KeyManagement slot) has a definition that allows encryption, and even that I was somewhat suspicious of overlapping with, as I couldn't predict how those existing keys were being used, and didn't want to support every possible key type that might be in that slot (which users likely wouldn't be able to alter). age-plugin-yubikey avoids this complexity by only interacting with the 20 "retired" slots, which have no constraining definitions. (I am considering adding restricted support for the KeyManagement slot specifically for CAC card users who aren't allow
Read the rest
ed to add new keys to their cards [0], but this would be behind a default-off feature flag to keep the primary UX simple.) [0] https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey/issues/62
In age v1.1.0-rc.1: plugin and YubiKeys support
str4d·Apr 30, 2022
> and also a mobile app that can do this (right now I use PasswordStore on Android, which communicates with OpenKeyChain which is basically GPG for Android with a nice shell around it). So I use the Yubikey over NFC there (though USB is also possible if you really want), to access my passwords. It works pretty well after some initial hiccups. The age plugin system and its currently-specified IPC [0] focuses on easy interoperability via plugin discovery in the PATH. This works very well for native desktop applications (and even between e.g. a Windows host and WSL guest [1]), but obviously not for web or mobile. I'm not optimistic about dynamic plugin discovery ever being feasible for web, but in theory alternate plugin-discovery mechanisms could be figured out for mobile (e.g. Android Intents). Fortunately, the age plugin system is _also_
Read the rest
a relatively thin wrapper around the core age concepts of Recipients and Identities, so it's possible to write code for an age plugin that can also be used directly as a library! I haven't tried this with age-plugin-yubikey yet specifically, but it should be possible (after some refactoring) to produce a library that can be used to statically include support for YubiKeys directly in an age mobile app, backed by whatever Android library is currently used to provide YubiKey PIV access. [0] https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/pull/5 [1] https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey#windows-subsyste...
In Ask HN: CLI Tool for File Encryption?

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