If you have to send some private or secret message (for example, an email message) to someone, then you would want to encrypt that message with a strong encryption cipher. The open source Scrambled Egg program helps you do just that. It supports three step encryption – yes, it can encrypt your message three times – making the cracking of the message completely impossible. In the first step, it uses basic methods like ROT13, BZ2 or ZLIB. In the second step, it uses powerful ciphers like Blowfish, AES and RSA. In the third and the final step, it allows you to encode the message using Base64, JSON and XML etc.
You can download the Scrambled Egg from http://code.google.com/p/scrambled-egg/. The Scrambled Egg program is released under the GPL license so you are free to use it as you wish. The download is in the form of an MSI installer. You have to run the downloaded MSI installer to install Scrambled Egg on your system. After you have installed Scrambled Egg, you can run it from its Start Menu shortcut.
In the Scrambled Eggs main window, first of all you have to choose the mode by clicking on the Encrypt Mode or the Decrypt Mode buttons on the top. By default, Scrambled Egg starts in the Encrypt Mode. To ecnrypt a text, you can choose the three encryption algorithms for the three steps of encryption. In the first step, you can select an algorithm like ROT13. You are also free not to choose any algorithm for the first step by selecting None. In the second step, you should choose a strong cipher like AES from the list of many given like RSA, DES3, Blowfish etc. The third step is basically encoding algorthms so the encrypted message can be encoded into a text string ready to be used in an email message.
Finally type the password to be used to encrypt the message in the text box left to <- Pwd. In the text box under it, you have to type the message to be encrypted. The encryption is done in real-time as you type the message. The encypted message would appear in the right-side text box. You can choose to preserve the formatting of the text message (in case you copy pasted it from a web page or document) by checking the checkbox labeled Formatted text.
To copy the encrypted output, switch to the Decrypt Mode by clicking on the button on the top-right. In this mode you can select the encrypted message and copy it so you can use it in any program you want. If you want, you can also export the encrypted message into a PNG image file by clicking on the Export button.
If later you want to decrypt an encrypted message, then all you have to do is select the Decrypt Mode and reverse the encryption steps (the first step of encryption algorithm should be the third step of decryption algorithm and so on). Then copy paste the encrypted message (or import an PNG file). The decrypted message would appear in the left side text box.
The Scrambled Egg is a portable application written in the Python programming language and is available for Windows, Mac and many variants of Linux.It is simple and yet very powerful encryption application for everyday use.