€ncryptør: Now With 1%00 More Transposition!

I’ve spent the entire day working up the courage to tell you that you’re in immediate danger. Your secrets — what you thought you were hiding from the rest of the world — are in danger of discovery, thanks to lingual cryptanalysis!

Those of you who have been coming to Roboshrub Inc. for advice, absolution, or aggravation will recall my oft-mentioned encryption program, €ncryptør. You’ve used it over the years to leave strings of seemingly random characters on other people’s blogs, and as a proponent of obfuscation, that pleases me.

Three months ago to the day I released €ncryptør as an Opera widget. It’s been downloaded about 2300 times so far, which means there’s at least one person out there using it daily and singing praises to the genius and elegant simplicity of Kyle.

Kyle is the style of €ncryptør’s faux-file data pile. Whenever you load, save, or delete “files” in €ncryptør, that’s Kyle you’re dealing with. I named the Kyle framework after Kyle al Zabar (sometimes spelled “Sabar”), a refugee from the fictional nation of Microstan. He was vaporized in an impact with a high-velocity egg earlier this year.

But a revamped graphical file system was the only improvement I made when I widgetized €ncryptør. Did I look for ways to make the encryption code more secure? No. Did I... well, that about covers it. €ncryptør was basically a child’s toy, a primitive substitution cipher and a fancy GUI. That may have been good enough for the Caesars of Old, but we live in an industrialized global super-nation with crafty Hinterland Barbarians waiting to jump us at every turn.

Now you too can hold the line against eternal darkness with:

€ncryptør 1.25 for Browsers
€ncryptør 1.25 Widget for Opera

The new incarnation of this non-award-winning program introduces columnar transposition, which means someone won’t be able to decipher what you wrote very easily without the key you used. In fact, a combination of substitution ciphers (which €ncryptør already had) and transposition ciphers (which is has now) are the building blocks of the Data Encryption Standard. I don’t know what the implications of that are, but they sound pretty heavy.

Anyway, I’m leaving the old version up so that you can take a trip down memory lane whenever you feel like it; also, deleting it would probably break some bookmarks, and I’m against dead links. If you want to read some of your old messages, just turn off the transposition cipher. If you would like to know more about the fantastic life of Kyle al Zabar, look deep within your heart.

*UPDATE*
I just added a Polybius Square with a customizable alphabet and fixed some bugs. If you already downloaded the widget, you might want to do it again. Polybius is pretty awesome, even if it does double the size of your messages.

*UPDATE 2*
Another minor update. Ignore the man behind the curtain.