Picocrypt – small and secure encryption tool

Picocrypt is billed as a very small (hence Pico), very simple, yet very secure encryption tool that you can use to protect your files.

It’s designed to be the go-to tool for encryption, with a focus on security, simplicity, and reliability. Picocrypt uses the secure XChaCha20 cipher and the Argon2id key derivation function to provide a high level of security, even from three-letter agencies like the NSA.

A command-line interface is also available for Picocrypt. It can encrypt and decrypt files, folders, and globs, and supports paranoid mode and Reed-Solomon encoding.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Tiny using very little RAM.
• Portable – it doesn’t need to be installed and doesn’t need root privileges.
• Provides a secure password generator that you can use to create cryptographically secure passwords. You can customize the password length, as well as the types of characters to include.
• Supports the use of keyfiles as an additional form of authentication (or the only form of authentication). Any file can be used as a keyfile, and a secure keyfile generator is provided for convenience.
• Authenticates data in addition to protecting it, preventing hackers from maliciously modifying sensitive data
• Paranoid mode – provides the highest level of security available. Using this mode will encrypt your data with both XChaCha20 and Serpent in a cascade fashion, and use HMAC-SHA3 to authenticate data instead of BLAKE2b. Argon2 parameters will be increased significantly as well.
• Reed-Solomon – prevent file corruption with erasure coding. Picocrypt can still recover the header and decrypt your data with a high success rate. Picocrypt can also encode the entire volume with Reed-Solomon to prevent any corruption to your important files.
• Deniability – add plausible deniability to the volume. Picocrypt volumes typically follow an easily recognizable header format. However, if you want to hide the fact that you are encrypting your files, enabling this option will provide you with plausible deniability. The output volume will indistinguishable from a stream of random bytes, and no one can prove it is a volume without the correct password.
• Compress files – uses deflate compression before encrypting.
• Delete files – delete the input files after encryption.
• Recursively – encrypt and decrypt individual files individually.
• Split into chunks – by KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, and total.
• Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Website: github.com/Picocrypt/Picocrypt
Support:
Developer: Evan Su
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Picocrypt is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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