Alkemi protects your clear-text conversation with someone else whether over email, instant messenger, text messaging, forum posts, even over Twitter and stops any one without your permission from being able to know what you said.
ALKEMI keeps private communications private.
ALKEMI does not keep a history, does not contact the Internet, and there is no backdoor.
ALKEMI is not Government-approved. Or, as far as I know, Government-disapproved.
WITH ALKEMI THERE ARE JUST THREE EASY STEPS
Step One: Put text into the Original Text Box. You can type it in or paste from a source of your choice. Any language is OK. Any character set, like English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and others, are OK. And you can mix them up, say, Hindi text with Japanese and English, if that serves your purpose.
Step Two: Click on Set Key and add a key. The key is just letters, symbols and numbers. Again, like in Step 1, any language is OK, any character set is OK. You can also mix them up if you want.
Version 1.07.16 is NOT COMPATIBLE with previous versions.
Or this one for ALKEMI.ZIP containing ALKEMI.EXE Version 1.07.16 and ALKEMI.SHA which is a hash of ALKEMI.EXE (if you don't know what a hash is you can ignore it):
Some windows systems might balk at running ALKEMI.EXE. The application is signed but since the Internet has little experience with this app you may get warnings.
Alkemi is very simple to use. Basically, you type or paste your text into the Original Text screen, click on the Set Key button, type or input a key, or let Alkemi do it for you. You’ll see this step by step just below, and then click the right-pointing arrow. Alkemi will take your text, and, using your key, will output encrypted text in a special format called Hex Ascii, which is also just text. And being just plain text, it can be sent anywhere, text can be sent.
After you have your text in the Original Text box, click on the Set Key button:
And type in your key, which is just text. You can also copy and paste text into here as well from just about any source including most languages, like French, German, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and more. You can also mix them up. Alkemi doesn't care.
Here's a key from the New York Times Chinese edition.
You can also let Alkemi create your key using the Auto Create button. This button will instruct Alkemi to create a random 16 character key.
As with other keys, DO NOT FORGET TO SAVE IT. When you press Auto Create, the key is also immediately stored in your computer's Clipboard. And since the key is just text, you can easily paste it into a file or use Notepad or other text handling applications.
Just make sure you and your friends know the key.
Of course you can reuse your key all you want. So make sure you know the key or can access it somewhere.
As mentioned above, the KEY IS NOT STORED ANYWHERE except when ALKEMI is running and then only the CURRENT KEY.
What’s with all those weird capital letters and numbers?
That is your alkemized data. The original text is converted into a series of encrypted hex ascii data, which can be easily sent by text messaging, Messenger, Twitter, email or really any system in which you can send and receive text. You can print it out and mail it. You can even fax it. Now that’s old school!
Hex Ascii is just capital letters A,B,C,D,E,F and numbers 0-9 in groups of two. So it's just plain text, that's it.
The Alkemized data is automatically copied to your clipboard so in one step you can click the right arrow and then paste the alkemized data into your communication program.
Write your message in the Original Text box. Select a key (in this case, abcde). Click on the left-pointing arrow.
Then go to your favorite email program. Alkemi puts your Alkemized text immediately into your clipboard so you can just paste the Alkemized text into the email body, like this:
Or, you can use Twitter to communicate your message:
When your Twitter followers see that tweet they can copy the text into Alkemi and, using the key only you and your friends know, dealkemize it and see what you have to say.
So with Alkemi you can use just about any text-based communication application for private communications.
When you DE-ALKEMIZED your data, going the other way using the left-pointing arrow, the data is also automatically copied to your clipboard so you can immediately use it in other programs.
Again, this is just text. Weird text, perhaps, but just text. Here it starts with the number 5, followed by 2 then D then 2 then A, etc.
Anyway, it is just text. Plain old text, which you can email anywhere, text anywhere, Messenger anywhere.
Because it doesn’t look like anything of interest, email providers who care about how to monetize your data will not be able to pry into what you write.
Note the Hexascii data is much longer than the original data. Over 2 times as long.
Even though ALKEMI is fast, it does a LOT OF WORK!
That short message just above went through over 400,000 encryption routines.
Once you receive your data, perhaps like that interesting email, you just copy it from wherever and paste it into the Alkemized Text box in the application. Using the SAME KEY, click the Left-Pointing arrow. How you get the key is not part of the program. That’s for you and your friend to decide.
Here’s part of an article from the New York Times Chinese edition:
Using the same key, click the right-pointing arrow:
And the same thing happens: Alkemi takes your original text and converts it into Hexascii, keeping your text private.
Just to mention, your key can be in one language or characters and your Original Text in another. They are not related. And they can be mixed up. Your text can be a combination of whatever languages you want. Same with the key.
That’s it.
Really, it's just three steps:
Enter your data
Select or enter your key
Click the right-pointing arrow
Or the Left-Pointing arrow to get back the original text.
Here is a long series of capital A's, which we have alkemized.
And now we Alkemize our original text again:
The alkemized text is different. It will be different each time. But the key is the same. And even though the Alkemized text will be different each time, when you de-Alkemize, you get the same Original Text back.
So, now you know how easy it is to use Alkemi: Enter text, enter a key and click. And you know that each time you Alkemize text the result is different. And you know that you must keep your key secret. And you know you can email or text or use messenger to send Alkemized text to anyone who knows your key because, it is just text.
The key is almost like your password. EXCEPT THERE IS NO RECOVERY. If you lose the key, it is lost. LOST!
Here’s text consisting of the lowercase "a" repeated many times and the key is abcd:
So now we have our nice alkemized text on the right side.
But say this alkemized text is a message you got from someone and while you and your friend shared a key, perhaps you forgot it or typed it in wrong. So instead of abcd, you entered abc:
Notice it’s no longer abcd but now abc and I click the left-pointing arrow, this is what I get:
You can see that the Original Text is not correct.
JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE KEY IS KEEPING THE ALKEMIZED TEXT UNCHANGED.
In the image just below, my original text was that series of letter a’s. It was alkemized using the key abcd.
BUT now, the Alkemized text has been corrupted. Some small “z”s were added in the middle, doubtless by accident:
And now when we try to get our original text back, Alkemi will do its best to detect corrupt Alkemized data and stop the deAlkemization.
Encryption and Decryption are very exacting!
But there may be a solution to this.
Corrupted alkemized text can happen during transmissions, like email or perhaps by someone accidentally pressing a return key, or adding a space at the end, something not really visible.
So…
Below is the original message, both plaintext (on the left) and the Alkemized text on the right.
Use this if you suspect your Alkemized data has invalid characters in it.
This situation could arise if you are trading messages with someone, perhaps emails, and somehow some hard returns were introduced into the Alkemized text like this:
So when we try decrypt (dealkemize) this, we will get the warning message:
Or it might dealkemize without error but the Original Text will be corrupted.
A possible way out of this is to use the Clean link on the menu bar:
After we click the Clean link, our Alkemized text becomes this:
Which in this case was our original message.
Now, there might be other corrupt data introduced into the Alkemized message. If the corrupt data was in an Alkemized form, like, say, B4C5A012 or similar, the Clean button will not detect this. So your only hope is to reacquire the message and try again.
Pressing the Clean link on alkemized text that is not corrupt will have no negative effect.
NOTE: The Original Text box can hold a maximum of 12000 characters. Neither text box can hold images.
This is a complex topic. How is safety determined? Is it how well the key is protected? Or how well the encrypted data is protected from unauthorized decryption? How safe is any communication mechanism? How safe is Facebook? WhatsApp? Signal? How safe and secure is the iPhone? And what about side channel attacks? How well does the program clean up after itself?
Alkemi uses symmetric encryption. But unlike other symmetric encryption applications, where the encrypted data is a file (with the exception of Secure HTTP), with Alkemi encrypted data is NOT A FILE (unless the user decides to save it as a file). With Alkemi I can alkemize my message and send it out to my friends. Who are my friends? And where are they? Once Alkemi is finished, there is no more record of what it has done, unlike file encryption applications which leave a record of their work, i.e., the encrypted file. With Alkemi there is no encrypted file, just an encrypted message.
The encryption Alkemi uses was written by me starting in 2005. It is NOT MATHEMATICAL in nature. You can read more about at Andromeda Encryption if you are interested.
I alkemized a 12000 character Original Text. That took about 14 seconds and went through 64 million encryption routines.
There are several ways to get the original (called plaintext) data from encrypted data:
If you have the encrypted text, the program, in this case Alkemi, and the key: Just run the program with the key against the Alkemized text (called ciphertext) and that's going to work. That's how I designed it. That's the normal use.
BUT, if you have the encrypted text and the program or even the source code but not the key, your choices are pretty limited, in my view. All I can think of is: try all possible keys until the decryption (dealkemization) makes sense.
With Alkemi the key can be up to 32765 characters long, so this could take a while.
I do not believe there is any other mechanism available.
Alkemi runs on Windows 8 and 10.
Version 1.06.2: If you want to see the number of characters in the Original Text box and Alkemi processing times and number of encrypts it uses, create a file where Alkemi.exe resides called "devmode.txt". It doesn't matter what is in this file, just that this file exists. Alkemi will look for this on start up and should it exist, Alkemi shows these values when running.
Version 1.07.1: New: Auto Create button for the Key. If you are uncomfortable or unsure creating a key, click this button. It will create a 16-character key for you. The key can be used immediately. The key is immediately in your computer's clipboard so save it somewhere because if you use the key to Alkemize some text, the Alkemized text will replace the key in your clipboard.
Version 1.07.14: Simplified interface. Encryption is NOT compatible with previous versions. Better help.
Version 1.07.16: Prevents dealkemization of corrupted text.
