CECIES Tutorial: Easy Guide to Asymmetric Encryption & Decryption 🔐

CECIES is a super simple way of encrypting and decrypting data using asymmetric cryptography, specifically: using elliptic curve cryptography.

It provides a visual user interface that wraps the equally named native C library, which is fully open-source (Apache-2.0 licensed) and available on GitHub: https://github.com/GlitchedPolygons/cecies

Currently supported elliptic curves are:

* Curve448
* Curve25519

More information about what asymmetric cryptography is, and how it protects your privacy and data, can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQDCe585Lnc

Here's some more links too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Encryption_Scheme

Choosing secure passwords (by Bruce Schneier):

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/choosing_secure_1.html

ECIES Schema picture source used in the video:

https://cryptobook.nakov.com/asymmetric-key-ciphers/ecies-public-key-encryption

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Nothing better than manually encrypting data that is dear to you, and that nobody except you and the recipients YOU choose may read. This is the absolute sweet-spot between security and comfort:

You can generate a keypair locally within the app, and then send your public key to your friends so that they may write you messages.
Likewise, you will ask your friends for their public key, which you can comfortably scan using the integrated QR code scanner (or manually via copy & paste).

The app can optionally save your most used recipients' public keys in a local keyring along with a descriptive label, but you are in no way forced to save anything: you can also use CECIES with raw copy and paste without storing anything at all.

Messages can be compressed before being encrypted to save some space when necessary. It's all configurable inside the app settings.

Try it out now! Take action, and start encrypting sensitive information manually yourself! Start taking privacy seriously with CECIES!

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Are you more interested in an even simpler, more traditional symmetric variant of this app? Take a look at Psíthyros, which does the exact same thing as CECIES except it uses a password (symmetric encryption) instead of an asymmetric key-pair:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glitchedpolygons.pwcrypt