this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Someone else can confirm but Keepass seems to use symmetric encryption, whereas Pass definitely uses an asymmetric key pair.
This is why I gave up on Pass. Obviously it has its advantages or they wouldn't have done it, but personally I find that this is too much complexity for something as critical as password storage. I want to be able to access the vault with a single memorized master password and nothing else. That is only possible with symmetric encryption.
I'm guessing, they did it this way, because there's no persistent process to keep the decrypted files open. You'd need to ask the user for the password for every single command they run. With GPG, that persistent process is
gpg-agent.Of course, encryption with a GPG key is also going to be more secure than the longest password you can come up with.
I guess, many people will want access to GPG, too, if they want access to their passwords, so they're not bothered by it.
But yeah, I do also remember setting that up on Android, where you need a separate app to do the GPG, and it really stops feeling simple pretty quickly...
This is not correct as pass uses GPG, and you can do symmetric encryption with it, it is just a different parameter in the command.
You can use a different password per file, or the same one
Citation needed,
manpage says nothing about that. Of course, you can use GPG directly to get symmetric, that is what I chose to do