Tag Archives: email encryption

Email, Encryption, Privacy, Security

Encrypt Your Emails – Part Two

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In our last post, we described how to encrypt an email using JavaScrypt, a simple but effective way to hide your personal information from prying eyes. That post is here: Encrypt Your Emails For Free. Today’s post assumes that you’ve read the linked one so, if you haven’t read it yet, head over and check it out. We’ll wait…

Back? OK, here we go. The message that we used yesterday was very simple but the encoded message was obviously encrypted. What if we still wanted to encrypt a message but didn’t want it to look as if it was in code? It’s pretty clear that an encrypted message would raise suspicions about its content, even if that content was completely innocent. Here’s how to solve that problem.

Steganography is the term for this process, hiding something in plain sight. There are several ways to do it but, for now, let’s stick with what we learned yesterday. To accomplish this task, you must have two browser windows open. First, open up the link from yesterday’s post. Here it is: JavaScrypt Encryption.

When the page opens, run through the same process as we described previously, generate a code, write a simple message and then encrypt it. You’ll end up with something that looks like this:

Photo of Steganography 1
Gobbledy guck, mishmash, pure Blarney, right?

 

It’s painfully obvious that this is an encrypted message. Let’s make it look like bad poetry. Open this page: Stego! Text Steganography. Both pages are by the same person, more on him later, so they look very similar. What we’re going to do here is simply copying and pasting from one browser window to the other. Our aim is to hide the encrypted message in text that looks vaguely normal, in other words ‘words’. Let’s get going:

1. We will use the encrypted message in the photo above. Highlight it then right click and choose Copy. Go to the Stego page (link just above this), click in the pink box, right click and  choose Paste. Under the pink box is the word Hide. Click it.

Photo of Steganography 2
Click the Hide button.

 

2. Once you click the Hide button, a new message appears in the orange box at the bottom.

Photo of Steganography 3
What’s this? Some gibberish?

 

3. What we have now is an encrypted message that has been transformed into something that looks a bit less intimidating and a whole lot less suspicious. What do we do now? We can’t decrypt this gibberish, not directly anyway. We have to ‘unhide’ it. Normally you would have to copy the words from an email then paste them into the orange box. For now, just erase the encrypted message in the pink window and leave the words in the bottom window. Like this:

Photo of Steganography 4
Empty the top box and click the word Seek.

 

4. Click Seek and the original encrypted message will appear in the top box again.

Photo of Steganography 5
Voilà! It’s back again.

 

This two page, multi-step process takes an email, or any text document for that matter, encrypts it, then changes the encrypted message into something that resembles normal English. If this text happened to be buried in a much longer document, there’s a good chance that it wouldn’t be noticed. While this whole thing takes a bit of extra time, we think you’re more likely to slip beneath the radar, if you know what we mean.

TIP: In order to use this system, all of the settings have to be the same for the encryption and the decryption as well as for the ‘hiding’ and ‘seeking’. Each page of the site gives you ample information to change the settings to your own specifications but be sure to make a record of those settings if you want to have a problem-free experience.

The site that we’ve linked to here belong to John Walker, co-creator of the Autodesk company and its software (AutoCad). Both pages that we’ve mentioned can be downloaded and run on your computer, no Internet connection is necessary. In other words, you could perform all of your encryption/decryption tasks ‘offline’.

Should you encrypt your emails? That’s up to you. We don’t but we sleep a bit better knowing that, if the need arises, we could. If you think the process described here is new, it’s not. The two pages we’ve mentioned were created in 2005. We are not naive enough to think that this simple encryption process is invincible to decryption by a third party and neither should you. What we have described here will keep your private information out of the hands of people who shouldn’t be snooping in your stuff anyway. Besides, it’s fun to experiment with this and it makes very interesting chatter at the dinner table, right?

Thanks for reading! Like us on Facebook and you’ll be able to keep up with our latest news and posts: Computer Made Simple on Facebook.

 

 

 

Email, Encryption

Encrypt Your Emails for Free

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As of today, June 11, 2013, it’s been revealed the the U.S. government has been snooping in every email, every text message, every online chat and probably every other form of communication for quite a while. Your privacy is gone, you probably know that already, and we think it’s going to be a long time before you get that privacy back. We think that it’s not only the U.S. that is doing this. We’re in Canada and we’re quite sure it’s happening here, too.

How does all of this affect you? You’re probably saying, “I’m not doing anything illegal. I’ve got nothing to worry about”. That may well be true but this spying could affect your life in many different ways. Do you bank online? Do you do your taxes online? As you know, your tax information is supposedly between you and your tax department. It doesn’t matter if you are a hitman for the mob, as long as you declare your income, you are safe from prosecution by the tax department. That’s all changed, hasn’t it? Now the government knows you’re a hitman, they know how much you make and they know, likely, who pays you. Anything that you report to the IRS, for example, is wide open to every other government agency. This has been happening since 2007, by the way. Maybe it’s time to rethink how you do things on the Internet.

Today’s post deals with email encryption. We’ve been searching for an easy and free way to re-secure privacy when sending and receiving emails. We’re going to do at least two posts on this, so let’s get started.

1. Head over to this site:

JavaScrypt Encryption and Decryption

2. The page itself is self-explanatory but we’re going to run through the steps to use it, just in case you get lost. There are three parts to any encryption process. First you need to know how to decrypt what you encrypt. If you think of encryption as the secret code writing that you may have enjoyed as a child, you know that in a simple transposition code, the person who gets your message must know how to rearrange the letters to read it. With the type of encryption we’re discussing here, you need a key to both encrypt and decrypt any message you send. The key takes the place of the encoding rules that you used as a kid.

As you can see on the JavaScrypt site, the key is the first part of the process. You can use your own or have one generated for you. The generated key is quite long and complicated but, obviously, very secure. In your case, you could use a simpler key that could be made up of a series of numbers and letters, something that is relatively easy to remember. Think of parts of your first address, your old cell number, your mother’s maiden name, things like that. If the pieces of the key are easy to remember, then you don’t have to write it down. In that case, although the key may not be as secure as the generated one, it is a bit more secure because it’s not written down anywhere, right?

3. Once you have the key, you need the message to encrypt. You may not have a need to send an encrypted email to a friend or relative but maybe you want to send personal information to yourself. Let’s say you want to save a copy of your password list. Encrypt it and send it to yourself in an email. As long as you remember the key, your information is safe and you can retrieve it.

Let’s generate a key on the site:

Photo of Email Encryption 1
A text key is shown.

 

4. The site describes the difference between a Text key and a Hexadecimal key. We’ve used a Text key but read the description and make your own decision. Next comes the message:

Photo of Email Encryption 2
Something simple for our example.

Enter the text in the green box. Don’t worry about length at this point. You can always send long messages in multiple emails.

 

5. Once the text has been entered and you have chosen a key, kit the Encrypt button:

Photo of Email Encryption 3
Message above, encrypted message below. Jason Bourne would be proud of you!

 

6. So far we have two of the three parts we need. Let’s see how we get the third part. The encrypted message is in the pink zone. Let’s delete the original message from the green zone:

Photo of Email Encryption 4
The original is now history but the encrypted message still remains.

 

7. Move down to the pink area and set your cursor up in the top left corner and hit the Enter key to move everything down one line. That will leave an empty line at the top, right?

Photo of Email Encryption 5
An empty line is needed to copy and paste the key into the encrypted message.

 

8. Go up to the key line, highlight it and click the right mouse button then choose Copy. Go back to the pink area and click in the empty line, right click and choose Paste:

Photo of Email Encryption 6
The key is in place now so press the Decrypt button.

 

9. As long as the green box is empty, the message will reappear there as soon as you press the Decrypt button.

Photo of Email Encryption 7
There it is! As if by magic, the message appears again.

 

That’s it! You’ve just encrypted then decrypted a message than would be very hard to decrypt unless someone knew the key. How secure is this system? Secure enough that it would take a fairly long time for anyone to decrypt it, if indeed they could. The better the key, the more secure the message.

TIP: Keys are not a one-time, throwaway item. You could use a different key for each message but you could also use the same key for each friend. As long as someone has the key you used for encryption, they can decrypt your message.

If the key is easy for you and your friend/relative to remember, there is no need to write it down. Even so, you don’t want to send the key in an email, right? There are many ways to get the key to the person without using electronic means. Be creative!

This has been a long post but it’s an important topic, isn’t it? Let us know what you think about this or any other topic that’s important to you.

Thanks for reading!