Cryptography has existed for just about as long as written communication – well, generally speaking. At its simplest form, cryptography or encryption is the notion of taking text and rearranging the letters so the initial message is otherwise obscured. transposing hello to elloh is a trivial example of encryption – not unlike what we remember from the back of the cereal boxes and decoder rings when we were mere kids.

Obviously, in the modern era with otherwise infinite computing power, encryption algorithms are immensely complicated. Encrypted text is unreadable and basically impossible to decipher without the correct decoding or password cipher.

Scrambled Egg is an open-source and portable Windows application that offers a simplistic yet extremely secure method to encrypt and decrypt text-based communication. Scrambled egg supports AES, ARC2, Blowfish, CAST, DES3 or RSA algorithms with a user supplied password. The password used is not contained within the resulting encrypted text so therefore, with a strong password and a proper implementation of the algorithms, the text is impossible to decipher.

The software uses the two-panel interface with the plain text message on the left and the encrypted resultant on the right. Below we’ve encrypted the first paragraph of this article using the AES algorithm and the password cipher of howinthetech.

The encrypted text can then be copy and pasted to the recipient where it can then be decrypted, assuming they’ve already been informed of the password cipher.

Encryption is a great idea but obscuration is even better. Therefor, Scrambled Egg has the capability to export the scrambled text as a PNG image file that can contain the message hidden in the file’s meta data. Now not only would a would-be cracker need to figure out the password cipher, they would also need to locate a random PNG file on the recipients computer.

Download Scrambled Egg