Xecrets Highlights

Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli use strong encryption to protect your files, implemented with attention to best practices. We only use well-known and well-tested algorithms, modes of operations and implementations. The cryptographic primitives are AES-256 for symmetric encryption, RSA-4096 for public key encryption, and SHA-256 for hashing.

Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli use keyed strong authentication to ensure that the data has not been tampered with. The authentication used is HMAC-SHA-256, and the key is derived from the password, thus ensuring that not only can only someone who knows the password decrypt the data, but also that the data has not been modified in any way.

Xecrets Cli which does all actual encryption and decryption is free open source software, available on github. Not only is it open source, but care has been taken to make it easy to build, there are no complex dependencies to setup, no additional toolchains required except the .NET SDK, and it can be built with entirely free tools on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Leveraging the .NET framework as well as the Avalonia UI framework, both Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli are available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Both Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli are portable, which means they do not require any kind of installation and can be run directly from a USB stick or similar, or from any other location. They are both packaged and distributed as a single executable file with no external dependencies, not even the .NET framework needs to be present on the system.

Xecrets Ez is extremely easy to use, with small and compact user interface, as well as drag and drop and copy/paste support. Xecrets Cli is a command line tool, but it is designed to be as easy to use as possible, with a simple and consistent command line interface.

With the automatic/one-click re-encryption feature, Xecrets Ez makes it really easy to work with encrypted files. No more manual steps to decrypt, edit, and re-encrypt files.

With Xecrets Ez you can not only encrypt files, but also regular, plain, text. This is great for example when you want a quick way to share sensitive but brief information with someone else. Just type or paste the text, set a password, hit a button and you get an encrypted text that you can share in anyway that supports text, such as email or a messaging service. Send the password to the recipient via a different channel, such as an SMS or just phone and say it.

In addition to the file encryption and decryption features, there's more. For example, there's a secure and strong password generator, producing sensible but strong passwords. A file shredder is of course included. For additional ease of use with strong passwords, we support the YubiKey hardware security key.

You can also configure the app to automatically exit after a time of inactivity.

Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli are designed to encrypt individual files, not entire directories or drives. This means that you encrypt only the files you want to protect, and it is clear what is encrypted and what is not. Any file of any type and any size can be encrypted. The encryption also always follows the file, so if you send, upload, move or copy the file, it remains encrypted.

Our encryption not only encrypts the file data, but also the metadata of the file, including the original filename, file modification dates and times and even whether or not the file is compressed. So you can rename the file to anything you want, and it will still get decrypted with the original filename. This is important, as the filename can often reveal sensitive information about the file contents.

Entering a password to encrypt or encrypt your data is the most intuitive and easy way possible to encrypt data. As long as the password is strong, your data is safe, but independent of any other factors. All you need is the software and to know the password. The software is designed to use the password in a cryptographic secure way, and the password is never stored or transmitted in any way.

Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli both support secure deletion of the original file after encryption or for any file. This means that the original file is securely wiped and deleted, and cannot easily be recovered. While this is not always a working defense against specialized forensic tools able to access modern solid state drives directly, it still provides a good level of protection against casual or even determined attempts to recover the original file from the file system. Coupled with full drive encryption such as BitLocker, LUKS or FileVault it provides an extremely high level of protection for deleted data.

Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli are designed to work with any type of cloud storage of files, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, and many others. The encryption always follows the file, so if you upload an encrypted file to the cloud, it remains encrypted. The cloud provider cannot read the file, and neither can we.

Xecrets Ez and Xecrets Cli are very actively developed, with new features and improvements being added regularly. Head on over to the release notes to see what's new! We are always looking for ways to improve the software, and we are always open to feedback and suggestions from our users.

Updated Dependencies and Tools

We also minimize our technical debt, by keeping all of our dependencies and tooling up to date. This ensures forward compatibility and minimizes the risk of vulnerabilities in our tools and dependencies affecting the product. We prefer Long Term Support (LTS) versions of our dependencies, and tools, but may in some cases use newer versions if they provide significant benefits and are generally available.