Maybe you want to fight Prism and keep your communications very private. Maybe you just like secret codes.
There's an awesome free tool called Infoencrypt that will garble up your messages and make them unreadable to everyone except the intended recipient. Here's what it looks like:
Simple enough. A place to type your message, then a field to enter a password. Infoencrypt uses that password as the means to encrypt your message.
Let's say I encrypt "Hello world" and I use "diehard3" as the password. Here's what I get back:
It successfully encodes and mangles a message to the point that a third party can't read it. All I have to do to send this is copy and paste it into an email and press send. The only way for a recipient to make sense of a message is to paste it into the same tool, type the correct password, and Infoencrypt will spit out the decrypted message.
This is effective encryption because there's no one-for-one character substitution, using "P" to represent "H" or "2" to represent "F," for example. This method enables a computer to use the same character to stand for multiple characters. Even the number of letters in the encoded message doesn't match up with the length of the true message. All good news to someone concerned with information security.
Despite these advantages, your message's security hinges entirely on your keyword/password remaining secret. Infoencrypt has the following pointers to help you pick a strong one:
- Use passwords at least 8 characters long.
- Do not use simple passwords (like '123456', 'qwerty', etc), because they can be easily broken.
- Do not send passwords inside the encrypted message. Transmit the password using another channel, such as over the phone.
- Use a unique password for every message.
Happy emailing!