Cipher/Decipher

Since not everyone minds their own business, individuals started coming up with methods of hiding documents and messages to be accessed only by those who know a specific language or code. The practice holds on to this day, and specialized applications like Cipher/Decipher allow you to send messages in a custom cipher.

Before you can even run the application, it’s best to make sure that Java Runtime Environment is installed on the computer you plan to use it on, because it’s one of the required components. You’re free to carry it on a USB flash drive, without worrying that the target PC gets affected in any way, because registries are not modified.

A small window shows up on launch, with a simple configuration panel that’s pretty easy to grasp from the first few seconds. The process, unfortunately, can only apply to messages you need to write down in a dedicated field, because it’s not possible to load a file, not even a plain text document.

The whole process consists of replacing specific letters in with other you also need to input. For instance, targeting the letter “a” to be replaced with “x” changes all occurrences of “a” with “x”. This isn’t done at random, and you have a little control over the whole operation.

First off, you need to specify the number of letters you want to replace, or you can load a configuration file if you’ve already gone through the process. The number of letters you want to replace brings up an equal number of fields for target characters.

Next to them are replacement fields, which you also need to manually specify. The advantage here is that, unlike the target field, replacement characters aren’t limited to a single one, and you can replace one letter with a whole word, or random string of characters. Sure enough, you need to know which is which in order to be able to read the message.

All things considered, we can state that Cipher/Decipher is a lightweight application that comes in handy for stealthy communication. Sure enough, the overall process doesn’t fully secure your message, but it all depends on the number of characters you decide to replace, and with what.