>Ok, for the thick-headed: my point is I'll use AES. Good luck with your toy project.
"AES" without specific qualifications and with instructions sourced from Stack Overflow is an ad-hoc toy project.
Age, on the other hand, is a well specified, approved by several domain experts, best-practices project.
In the end you can do whatever, but don't use some custom solution ("AES" or not) for anything where human lives or money might depend on.
>Also authenticated encryption is not something I want all the time. I don't always want an identity tied to cipher text, even if the identity is anonymous.
Identity is not what "authenticated encryption" is about. It's about protecting about certain classes of cipher-text attacks, which people (bad people, one would assume) can use to get information about your encryption.
"AES" without specific qualifications and with instructions sourced from Stack Overflow is an ad-hoc toy project.
Age, on the other hand, is a well specified, approved by several domain experts, best-practices project.
In the end you can do whatever, but don't use some custom solution ("AES" or not) for anything where human lives or money might depend on.
>Also authenticated encryption is not something I want all the time. I don't always want an identity tied to cipher text, even if the identity is anonymous.
Identity is not what "authenticated encryption" is about. It's about protecting about certain classes of cipher-text attacks, which people (bad people, one would assume) can use to get information about your encryption.