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Member #: 14137

Not sure if the 6648 is entirely acurate more of less a few bits but I forgot.

Is this level even possible? Its a program called shyfile www.shyfile.de. I've used it once, it encrypts text to a very high level.

Does it even work?

Rank: ? (614)
Member #: 9832

6144 bits...

It's symmetric (secret key) encryption like rijndael or DES. I don't think there's any limit to key length in most algorithms used nowadays (symmetric or asymmetric), only performance. However the algorithm itself looked very simple and is probably their design. If they told everything it is simply XOR with few permutations (changing the order of blocks).

They make big noise about the use of permutations: "ShyFile twists the order of those bytes and nibbles of the whole ciphertext like a whirlwind." this is nothing special, pretty much every algorithm does that.

Rijndael for example expands the 256 bit key into 16 round keys and using these 16 different key performs 16 rounds, and inside every round several XOR operations are performed together with permutations. It looks like shyfile does only one pass.

"One of the most interesting aspects of this application is that in the process of encoding, the user's plain text (or plain binary data) is mixed up with randomly created junk data. The junk data is created by an exclusively developed random generator and not by the random generator that comes within the Windows operating system."

Once again almost every cryptosystem uses some random data to prevent known plaintext attack or to make identical plaintexts to encrypt into different ciphertexts... This is usually called IV and even my application had that (though created with windows generator, because for reasons too long to write here I considered that to be fairly unimportant...)

"the user will need to enter a few arbitrary characters to initialize that random generator."

The pgp for example uses random characters and the timing of user input (time between characters)... little bit more effective I suppose...

All in all, maybe not too bad but certainly not as good as many existing FREE applications like PGP (or mine just kidding...)

looks like they are trying to sell their software, I would not pay for it...