Please check for security issues and updates at http://eastridges.com/encryption . Check for authenticity of this program: The PublicKeyToken (found under menu selection Help, About) should be: 03a24994871e0b69. Send any comments to encryption[at]eastridges.com. However, I cannot promise to read or answer all e-mail. Please do let me know if you find this program useful.. Thanks.
This program uses the Rijndael encryption scheme to encrypt what is shown on the screen before saving it to disk, asking the user for a password. The encryption is only as strong as the password supplied. The password may be up to 32 characters long, and can include numbers and punctuation for additional strength.
The average computer user would not be able to read your file without guessing your password. An experienced cracker could use a password-guessing routine to try all the words in the dictionary and then some until they find yours. There may even be a way for a code-breaker to narrow the list of passwords down by some characteristic of the encrypted data that I'm not aware of. I don't personally have a way to break the code, but one should assume it is possible.
If you forget your password, the data is lost. At least, I don't have a way to retrieve it, and I did not build a "back-door" way to retrieve lost data.
If you want to make a second copy of the file for extra safety from data loss, think of a different name for the file.
The program automatically makes a backup when overwriting a file if the filename extension is .wes. For example saving a new copy of fileName.wes generates a backup of the previous file and names it fileName.bak.wes.
You can copy and past the text shown in the screen between this program and other programs. I use the following keyboard shortcuts for text selection:
Move cursor to beginning of text : <Ctrl><Home>
Select all the text from cursor to the end of the text: <Shift><Ctrl><End>
Copy selected text to clipboard: <Ctrl><Insert>
Paste clipboard text to the screen where the cursor is: <Shift><Insert>
This program is written in C# and requires the Microsoft.NET Framework version 1.1 to run. The RijndaelManaged class in Microsoft's .NET framework does the encryption.