CryptNote

Note: The application may trigger antimalware alerts, but our tests have shown that these are actually false positives, which means that it's safe to download and run CryptNote.

Keeping text documents safe is becoming more and more difficult, due to the diversity of malicious agents available on the web. A fair example for this are keyloggers that, once infiltrated into your computer, monitor your keyboard activity and may therefore learn secrets, such as passwords to wireless networks or email accounts.

An application that wishes to help in this scenario is CryptNote. Although it's a really old tool and has some sketchy options that made it initially troublesome for us to figure out how it works, the app turns out to be a pretty solid text editor with emphasis on security, as long as you don't mind the lack of most text editing features.

Engulfed in a simplistic interface that makes you feel you traveled back in time to the era of Windows 95, CryptNote had no sort of trouble running in Windows 10 in our tests. As said earlier, it might look plain but it's not so easy to discover the mechanisms behind it.

We won't bore you with details about standard text editing options since there's nothing to mention. One word of advice would be to stay away from Ctrl+Z (undo) because this seems to erase everything. Ctrl+A (select all) doesn't work either but Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (copy and paste) are good to go.

As such, text can be written or pasted. We're leaning toward the second option due to the risk of accidentally deleting everything. Next, before saving the text to file, you are prompted to set a passphrase and confirm it, and this is where things become interesting.

Firstly, CryptNote supports the AES/Rijndael algorithm, which means that the password will be difficult to crack. Nevertheless, it's recommended to make it as complex as possible (lower and upper case letters, symbols, numbers, many characters).

Secondly, we're looking at how it works: the saved, encrypted file can only be opened with this program. After launching CryptNote and selecting the file to open, you have to enter the correct key. However, if you specify different passwords for different files, you have to remember all keys (one key cannot be assigned to multiple files at once). If this makes things complicated, you should probably turn to a password manager to keep track of all keys.

The text editor itself is far from good but, combined with the AES/Rijndael encryption method, it makes document security a breeze.