VSTextHash Portable

Although online privacy is an increasing security issue, you can resort to simple techniques to exchange secret messages with your friends. A common method implies encrypting the text before sending it over the web, provided that the person receiving it has the means of decrypting the message.

Unless you want to use cryptographic solutions, which involve keys necessary for text decryption, you can turn to a simpler way, by just encrypting the text with predefined security methods: hashes. These are also used in file encryption by programs like VSFileHash Portable. Another benefit ensured by checksums is that you can tell if the original message was altered in any way, by comparing its hash to the one of the received text. This is because the slightest character modification changes the hash entirely.

VSTextHash Portable is a lightweight and easy-to-use tool designed for this very purpose. It can calculate text hashes using SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, MD2, MD4, MD5, Panama, Adler32, CRC32 and other algorithms.

Because it doesn't require installation, you can double-click the .exe to reach the main app window right away as well as keep it saved on a USB flash drive to quickly launch it on all your machines.

In the main window, you can type or paste the text you want to encrypt, pick the preferred algorithm from the upper part of the screen, and discover the hash immediately. Besides regular text, VSTextHash can parse the message as bytes in hex or Base64.

In addition to copying the resulted hash to the clipboard for further use, you can select your favorite algorithm and set it as default, view keyboard shortcuts, switch to another UI language, ask the tool to auto-copy the hash, apply a proxy configuration for establishing the Internet connection, and customize the font and colors of teh input and output windows.

Unfortunately, there is no option available for decrypting text hashes, which means you have to resort to another tool for this purpose.