Encipher.it will encrypt and password protect your text messages using symmetric encryption implemented with AES256 and PDBKF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function) for key generation, the site itself uses a SSL digital certificate to protect against MITM (Man In The Middle) attacks, the best part is that it works with all services, you can encrypt your webmail messages no matter who your provider is, another possible use is posting of encrypted messages on Usenet or your Facebook account, encryption and decryption is performed in your browser using javascript, no data leaves your browser in plain text.
To encrypt the messages you use a bookmarklet that takes you to the encipher.it website, there you will find a box where to enter text, the same box is used for encryption and decryption, when the recipient gets a coded message a one line phrase with a link link tells them where to decrypt it, the bad news is that they will need to know the password too, this should have been transmitted previously through a secure channel, attachments can not be encrypted.
Encipher.it webmail encryption
Encipher.it can be used anywhere, i.e. Internet cafes and libraries, but anything you type in the keyboard of a computer that isn’t yours could easily be recorded, when you use a public computer you should not trust anything on it, if the website were to become too popular it might be easily blocked by an authoritarian regime ISP but that isn’t likely because copycats would then sprout around.
I would only be happy to use this browser based symmetric encryption system if the other part is very lazy about security or doesn’t want to learn about it and the security needs are low. Encrypting text, even with something as simple as ROT13 will leave the average computer users scratching their heads and it will fool email services that scan email messages to introduce contextual advertising on them, like Gmail, for serious security it is better using a public key encryption based system, i.e. PGP, what encipher.it has on its favour is convenience and easy of use.
