As its name states, Crypter is a modern and very easy-to-use cryptography application. In short, it allows you to encrypt and decrypt files and folders.
The encryption and decryption procedures
Even though its GUI is minimalist, there’s a lot going under the hood of Crypter. The app derives a MasterPassKey from the MasterPass. The MasterPass itself is obtained during the installation process by using the PBKDF2 key derivation algorithm.
the PBKDF2 is used to derive various encryption keys from the MasterPassKey, which in turn is used to encrypt files and folders on your computer. To ensure the integrity of your encrypted files and folders, authentication is done using the AES-256-GCM symmetric block cipher.
The encryption procedure goes as follows: Crypter creates a temporary hidden directory called “.crypting.” Next, it encrypts the user-selected file with the crypto defaults and “flushes” the encrypted data to a file in the directory (by default called “data”).
Crypter compresses the directory to a tar archive with the name of the user-selected file and the .crypto extension. Naturally, the decryption process is the exact opposite of encryption.
Versatility at its finest
One of the best aspects of Crypter is that it can be used on all major OSes, making it ideal for users who often switch OSes but still want to encrypt and decrypt files safely.
For such a simple app, Crypter has a lot of nuances. Thankfully, everything is thoroughly explained on the app’s GitHub repository page.
You can find all the necessary information regarding the app’s portability and MasterPass reuse, as well as a well-documented FAQ section.
Conclusion
For an open-source and free app, Crypter sure does offer a lot. It’s very easy to use if you just want to encrypt and decrypt files locally. Of course, achieving a good level of portability and the MasterPass reuse might require you to do a bit of reading beforehand, but other than that, Crypter is a solid, dependable, and useful encryption app.
