Hot on the heels of KyberLock, my app that makes quantum-proof encryption easy to use, I have developed two more new apps that you may like:
- KyberLock Universal is a browser extension that adds KyberLock encryption to any email. It also includes the password manager SynthPass.
- GroupKyber is an app that adds KyberLock encryption to file sharing for a group of users, by simple drag and drop.
GroupKyber is very similar to GroupEncrypt, but uses the Crystals-Kyber engine rather than elliptic curves. Likewise, KyberLock Universal is very similar to PassLok Universal, except for the quantum-proof Kyber engine replacing elliptic curves. Now, you may wonder why so much effort to swap the engine of these apps so they are quantum-proof. Some was explained in the post about KyberLock’s initial release, but it is worth repeating the point.
Quantum computers are on track to break current asymmetric encryption methods, including elliptic curves, within a decade. This is no problem for ephemeral data such as web sessions, but data stored in file sharing servers, for instance, may sit there unchanged for a number of years. Someone might think of grabbing the data now, even if encrypted, and then wait for quantum computers to be able to crack the encryption. Some data have a rather permanent value, so it is worthwhile to use a more permanent sort of encryption now in order to protect it.
With these new releases also came a number of updates: KyberLock and PassLok have acquired the drag-and-drop file encryption interface of GroupEncrypt and GroupKyber, and it is called File Drop mode. In this mode, files dragged into a large drop target are instantly encrypted or decrypted in Signed mode, which comes in handy with file sharing services. Folder Keys are also available so access can be changed to groups of files by just re-encrypting one file. The encrypted files have extension .crypt for PassLok and GroupEncrypt (mutually compatible), and .krypt for KyberLock and GroupKyber. These files are not compatible with the .plk and .kyb files, respectively, produced by the regular encryption operations, but can be of a larger size because they never get loaded into the page itself.
PassLok Universal also got updated, as well as PassLok for Email, which had gone a bit out of sync when Yahoo and Outlook changed their mail pages. In the future, I plan to update the Universal versions of PassLok and KyberLock in preference to PassLok for Email because those are fairly immune to changes in the email services.
URSA and its extensions also got an update since PolyCrypt is now the engine for its Human mode (four-word key rather than three).