Hacker 10 – Security Hacker

Tag: portable encryption program

  • Portable PGP encryption with GPG4USB

    Portable PGP encryption with GPG4USB

    GPG4USB is a portable program to encrypt text and files using GnuPG, the open source public key encryption system compatible with PGP. It works on Windows and Linux computers and does not require administrator rights for execution, files and messages can be exchanged with anyone using OpenPGP compatible software, like PGP Desktop or GPG4Win. The main interface will be familiar to anyone who has used PGP/GPG encryption in the past, you can create a keypair, import, export encryption keys, check key properties, upload keys to a keyserver, sign files, encrypt and decrypt files.

    You can also remove and add PGP headers to your messages, to see this feature you will have to go into settings click on the advanced tab and tick the “Show Steganographic Options” checkbox. Another advanced option is the possibility to split PGP encrypted attachments into pieces.

    Portable encryption GPG4USB
    Portable encryption GPG4USB

    The software comes with a very complete offline manual that any beginner will understand, to make this tool portable move the extracted files and “start_windows.exe” binary to a memory stick. GPG4USB could also become your main desktop GPG encryption software since it has a splendid interface that some people might find easier to use than other similar applications like WinPT.

    You should remember temporary files belonging to the encrypted data could still be found in any computer you use, that is the case for nearly all portable software.

    Visit GPG4USB homepage

  • Encrypt text files using the AES cipher with Scrambled Egg

    Encrypt text files using the AES cipher with Scrambled Egg

    This open source cross platform program will encrypt text messages using a wide range of algorithms to choose from, AES, Blowfish, ARC2, CAST, 3DES or RSA using your own public encryption key, text compression with Zlib or Bz2 can be performed before encryption.

    Scramble-Egg has a portable version to take it with you in a USB thumbdrive, needing 20MB of space, the software doesn’t need any administrator rights or special plug ins to run, it is an ideal portable encryption tool, the resulting encrypted text can be saved as XML, Json, UU or a .png image, a “No tags” option can be turned on and off depending on if you want the receiving end to know algorithm combination has been used leaving an attacker intercepting the encrypted message wondering what kind of file it is as it doesn’t have any identifying sign giving away what tool has been used for encryption, in order for someone to decrypt the message, besides the password, they will also need to know the cipher combination, if you eliminate tags you will have to inform the receiver about the used combination.

    You can copy the ciphered text and send it by email, paste in a document or post it to a Usenet group, encryption is performed in real time slowing down your computer as you type with the CPU load spiking implementing the encryption algorithm, as soon as you add a character or change some setting you will see the resulting ciphered text straight away on the second pane.

    Scrambled-Egg text encryption software
    Scrambled Egg text encryption software

    For covert communications you could easily embed a small encrypted text message in a webpage HTML code and in the event that anyone looked at the source code, which few people do, they would not be able to work out what the message says or what has been used to cipher it, the advantage of embedding an encrypted message on a website as opposed to sending it is that if the website has lots of traffic, it becomes impossible to know who received/read it.

    The help file is very basic and it could be improved, Scrambled Egg is easy to use but it appears to assume that people using it already understand what each one of the compression and encryption algorithms mean as the instructions do not explain anything about them, I would recommend you use AES for encryption as it is a standard algorithm widely reviewed by cryptographers and regularly tested for weaknesses. My favourite feature is that Scrambled Egg works in Windows, Linux and Mac, this makes it easy for your friends to use this encryption tool regardless of their operating system.

    Visit Scrambled Egg homepage