Lion Cipher Lab
Encrypt individual files with age
- Cyber / Security Engineer
- Beginner
- ~30 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Full-disk encryption protects a whole device when it's off, but it does nothing the moment you email a file, drop it in cloud storage, hand it to someone on a USB stick, or keep a backup on a drive that someone else can reach. For those everyday situations you want to protect one file at a time, so it stays scrambled no matter where it travels. age is a free, open-source tool built exactly for that: it's modern, small, and far simpler than the older standard (GPG), with one obvious way to do each thing instead of dozens of flags. In a few minutes you can lock a sensitive attachment, protect a…
What you'll learn
- understanding when file-level encryption helps (attachments, backups, sharing a secret)
- installing age and generating a keypair
- encrypting a file to a public key and decrypting with the private key
- encrypting with a passphrase for solo use
- sharing safely: send public keys, never private keys
- knowing the limits: lose the key and the data is gone; age hides content, not filename or size
Steps in this lab
- What file encryption is, and when it actually helps
- The two ways age locks a file: keys, or a passphrase
- Open a terminal and install age
- Generate your keypair
- Encrypt a file to a public key
- Decrypt with the private key
- Encrypt with a passphrase instead (no keys to manage)
- Share safely, and respect the limits
- Why age is the right first encryption tool