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Cryptext - file encryption utility

If you occasionally need to keep information hidden and safe, you might want to try out this little gem. It sits in your file context menu so that when you right click on a file or folder you just choose "encrypt" to lock the file. It will ask you for a password and quickly encrypt the file so that virtually nobody can get into it without the password. Decryption or unlocking is done the same way by right clicking on an encrypted file and choosing "decrypt".

Quote from the website http://www.pcug.org.au/~njpayne/

How secure is a 160-bit key? ... make your passwords fairly long and choose them carefully (don't use names or words that appear in a dictionary). We can make a small calculation on what is needed to break a 160-bit key with a brute-force attack. With 160 bits in the key there are 2¹⁶⁰ possible keys. It therefore takes, on the average, half that many attempts to find the correct key (2¹⁵⁹ or approximately 10⁴⁸ attempts). We can also make a few over-the-top assumptions about the resources dedicated to breaking the key:

there are one billion computers in the world (there are actually far fewer)
every computer is completely devoted full-time to breaking your key (!)
each computer can test one billion keys per second (!!)

With this amount of computing power devoted to the task it will take about 10¹³ years to find the key. That's about 1000 times the age of the universe.

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