Minisign: Portable and Minimalist Signature Tools
Minisign is a standalone signature tool aiming to be portable, minimalist, and easy to use and deploy. It supports Ed25519 signatures and serves as a simple alternative to PGP for signing and verifying files.
What is Minisign?
Minisign is an open source digital signature tool that provides an alternative to PGP for signing files and verifying their authenticity. Some key things to know about Minisign:
- It focuses on simplicity and minimalism - it only supports the Ed25519 signature algorithm rather than the multitude of algorithms supported by PGP.
- It's designed to be easy to use and deploy as a standalone, single-purpose utility, rather than a complex system like PGP.
- It uses small and portable signature files that are separate from the main data file being signed.
- Verification only requires the MiniSign public key file, not the whole web of trust model used by PGP.
- It's useful for signing software releases, documents, and other content where you want a simple way to ensure authenticity and integrity.
- Minisign is not focused on encryption like PGP - it signs data that may be transferred unencrypted over untrusted networks.
Overall, Minisign aims to provide a minimal, easy-to-use approach to signing and verifying files for authenticity using Ed25519 signatures. It dispenses with the complexities of PGP in order to be a simple standalone utility.