Portable NaCl-powered encryption
Salty makes it easy to send strongly-encrypted messages with a shared key. It uses NaCl (via Libsodium) for encryption and basE91 for portability.
With Salty, you can encrypt a message as long as 185 characters and the resulting cipher will still fit in a tweet (~277 characters), making it ideal for encrypting tweets or other length-restricted communication. You can use it anywhere, though, with text of any length.
You can try it out at https://neatnik.net/salty/
Unencrypted payload: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog.
Key: hunter2
Resulting Salty cipher:
-- BEGIN SALTY ENCRYPTED MESSAGE --
WZ {/ rf 4a aQ 8f tC WI c? VJ nK UQ
>T 7W nj W7 rR r~ r& :. zY NJ sm k6
`@ eq G5 Ty Tl uE %T uR AM D_ J~ "Y
p+ q2 AM dN 0} ;H #v Ez L_ 9m }! X^
Ws `v %) >v ,_ ^] 70 ,+ hv TN
-- END SALTY ENCRYPTED MESSAGE --
(Note that the cipher will change with each encryption.)
The above cipher is identical to this shortened version:
RX.c:L6%xUa,Rhg>w%@]X+rl|a4{uPVRa.)
;&wSOD+_(kJ=bZ?&_|*z+se035=Dw*2Rl?(
H&0c{~5i@CT!V&m5O4&BHNcEL:%c5Tbsd9n
#8++h/*YsGP
Using the key above on either cipher will yield the same plaintext message. Salty’s shortened format is ideal for space-restricted contexts (e.g. Twitter), whereas the longer format works better in emails or other places where text might need to freely wrap.
Salty’s spec is uncomplicated:
- Take a plaintext message and encrypt it via NaCl’s secret key authenticated encryption scheme “crypto_secretbox”.
- Then take the resulting binary data and encode it in basE91. (Why basE91? It’s the most efficient base conversion around, making the most effective use of available ASCII characters.)
- The resulting encoded cipher can be used as is, or wrapped in the BEGIN header and END footer, and spaces can be added to make the cipher wrap nicely in different places (e.g. email).
- When decrypting a cipher, first remove any spaces or newline characters, as well as the optional BEGIN/END header/footer. The resulting basE91-decoded cipher is ready for decryption via NaCl, using the same key and salt used during encryption.
Salty comes with an uncomplicated API. Simply POST an action of either encrypt or decrypt, a payload of plaintext to be encrypted or a Salty cipher to be decrypted, and a key. The response will include an http_status code (200 for success, 400 for failure) and a response consisting of your encrypted/decrypted text (or an error message if the status code is 400).
