h5p9sl / xmsg

A lightweight message encryption program

Xmsg

Xmsg is a lightweight message encryption program that provides the user with message encryption/decryption using secret keys.

Xmsg is not a chat client. It is simply a text encryption program.

Building/Installing

0. Clone the github repository

git clone https://github.com/h5p9sl/xmsg
cd xmsg

1. Customize config.mk to suit your operating system

Building

1. Run make

make xmsg

Installing

1. Edit the config.mk file to suit your operating system
2. Run make as root, if needed

make clean install

How to use

Run xmsg -h to get a list of commands.

Examples

• echo 'Hello World!" | xmsg --key 2 --encrypt
• cat file.txt | xmsg --key 0 --encrypt
• xmsg --key 0 -e < file.txt
• xmsg -k0 -e < file.txt > file.txt.enc

Feature Overview

• AES-256-CBC for encryption and decryption
• Prepends metadata in front of encrypted string
  • Metadata includes information like:
    • Message Length
    • Initialization Vector
• "Key chain" feature, which allows the user to manage multiple encryption keys.
  • User can create and destroy encryption keys using "--createkey" and "--deletekey" flags

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Beware that the source code may be a little messy and poorly documented, but I'm doing my best to clean it up over time.

Please feel free to submit bug reports in the form of issues, along with a detailed description of the bug, and how to replicate it.

Acknowledgments

https://github.com/kokke/tiny-AES-c

• aes.h
• aes.hpp
• aes.cpp

https://github.com/ReneNyffenegger/cpp-base64

• base64.hpp
• base64.cpp