The secret

Security over the web doesn’t just mean keeping your computer protected from any type of malicious content you can encounter, and can also refer to privacy of your messages. As such, various encryption tools got developed in this regard, and The secret is one of them, wanting to increase security of your texts.

First of all, the application comes in pretty lightweight package, and a simple download session is enough to have it functional, without being taken through a setup process. This also means it’s possible to carry it around on a thumb drive, but you do need to make sure that .NET Framework is on the computer you plan to use it on.

The visual design is not really something to make it stand out from the crowd, being composed of a classic window frame, colored background, dedicated input field, as well as corresponding buttons to encrypt and decrypt. There’s also a built-in calendar, but it barely serves any purpose other than pure informational.

Input is completely under your control, in the sense that it either needs to be manually written down, or pasted from clipboard, because there is no support for any kind of files, not even plain text ones. On the other hand, this can be a security method, making messages temporary, rather than leaving documents on your computer.

Encryption is performed at the press of a button, delivering result in the same field. Just like input, you need to use the clipboard to save the encrypted form. Decryption is performed in a similar manner. Sadly, the algorithm used isn’t really powerful, because the application only uses a custom font to replace regular characters, and doesn’t perform any advanced calculus to generate an unreadable key.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that The secret comes with good intentions, and can keep your text messages secure, mostly if they are of temporary importance and don’t end up on your computer for a long while. The visual design is rather poor, while the algorithm used for encryption leaves much to be desired.