Crypt-O-Magic - Ecrypt Your Files

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Information

Cryptography (from Greek kryptós, "hidden", and gráphein, "to write") is, traditionally, the practice of converting information to an obscured form to prevent others from understanding it. In the past, it was used to ensure secrecy in important communications, such as that between spies and controllers, or diplomats and their head offices. In recent decades, cryptography has expanded its remit and now provides mechanisms for more than just confidentiality; it has become a fundamental tool for security engineering.

Early in the 20th century, several mechanical devices were invented for performing encryption, including rotor machines — most famously the Enigma cipher used in World War II. The ciphers implemented by these machines brought about a significant increase in the complexity of cryptanalysis.

With the advent of digital computers and electronics, very complex ciphers could be implemented.

Extensive academic research into modern cryptography began in the 1970s with the specification of DES and the invention of RSA.

Crypt-O-Magic - Encrypt Your Files

Zeta uses the latest security standards to safeguard your hard work, protecting selected files from prying eyes. The Crypto lib encrypt the content using different cryptation technologies, and lets you as the user choose the technology you rely on! Crypt-O-Magic is a graphical front-end for this lib.

The application is both used to decode and encode the files that you want to keep closed for others, but doesn't prevent others from deleting them.

The files and folders that you want to decode or encode can simply be dragged and dropped on to the Source Files area of the application, and the same goes with paths. You can even type in the paths. An other approach, is to add the files through Select Files.

In the Destination Folder you can set your preferred folder for the files you decode. By default the folder is /boot/home.

After having chosen the where to place the files that you would like to encrypt, you must give it a password. The password must at least be of 5 digits.

At last you must choose what Protocol you would like to encrypt them in.

The decode process starts when you click Go, and you will then first be asked to confirm the password by writing it in to a dialog box that pops up.

You will be notified with yet another dialog box when decode process is completed.

The files that you have decrypted appears as generic files. When double-clicking on them, they will be opened in the application QuickRes. Once you have encoded the files again with this application, you will be able to open them again with their default applications.

The Various Protocols

- DES stands for Data Encryption Standard. The cryptographic algorithm specified in this standard transforms a 64-bit binary value into a unique 64-bit binary value based on a 56-bit variable. If the complete 64-bit input is used (i.e., none of the input bits should be predetermined from block to block) and if the 56-bit variable is randomly chosen, no technique other than trying all possible keys using known input and output for the DES will guarantee finding the chosen key. As there are over 70,000,000,000,000,000 (seventy quadrillion) possible keys of 56 bits, the feasibility of deriving a particular key in this way is extremely unlikely in typical threat environments. Moreover, if the key is changed frequently, the risk of this event is greatly diminished.
  DES has become vulnerable as computers got more powerful and simple DES is no longer secure and has been cracked. So NIST defined 3DES or Triple DES in 1999. 3DES uses three stages of DES so it is much more secure and suffices for most applications currently. In 2001, NIST replaced DES by AES.
- RC2 (RFC 2268) is a conventional (secret-key) block encryption algorithm and was considered as a proposal for a DES replacement. The input and output block sizes are 64 bits each. The key size is variable, from one byte up to 128 bytes, although the current implementation uses eight bytes.
- 3DES (RFC 3217) stands for Triple DES encryption algorithm (168-bit), and is concidered to be a strong form of encryption that allows sensitive information to be transmitted over untrusted networks. The protocol is a combined cipher that uses three iterations of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher to improve the security (at the cost of speed) of plain DES.
- RC4 is a stream cipher developed by Ron Rivest. Until 1994, RC4 was a trade secret of RSA Data Security, Inc., when it was released anonymously to a mailing list. This version is a descendent of that code, and since there is no proof that the leaked version was in fact RC4 and because "RC4" is a trademark, it is called "ARCFOUR", short for Allegedly RC4.
- AES 128 CBC encryption (Advanced Encryption Standard - FIPS-197). AES was developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen.
  Strictly speaking, AES is not precisely Rijndael, as Rijndael supports a larger range of block and key sizes); AES has a fixed block size of 128 bits and a key size of 128, 192 or 256 bits.
  It is hoped that AES will remain strong enough for the next 10-20 years.
- RSA is an acronym formed from the names of its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Aldeman. It is a Public-key algorithm that uses large prime numbers to achieve security.

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