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Wednesday, March 14, 2018

JavaScrypt Updated

I have just posted a new version of JavaScrypt, the first major update in thirteen years.

JavaScrypt is a collection of Web pages which implement a complete symmetrical encryption facility that runs entirely within your browser, using JavaScript for all computation. When you encrypt or decrypt with JavaScrypt, nothing is sent over the Internet; you can run JavaScrypt from a local copy on a machine not connected to the Internet. JavaScrypt encrypts with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) using 256 bit keys: this is the standard accepted by the U.S. government for encryption of Top Secret data. (While JavaScrypt is completely compatible with AES, it has not been certified by the U.S. National Security Agency as an approved cryptographic module and should not be used in applications where this is a requirement.) Companion modules provide a text-based steganography facility and generation of pass phrases and encryption keys.

This update is 100% compatible with earlier releases of JavaScrypt: encrypted files can be exchanged by the old and new versions with no difficulties. The updates bring JavaScrypt in line with contemporary Web standards.

• All HTML files are now XHTML 1.0 Strict and verified for compliance.
• There is a uniform CSS style sheet for all pages and the style is more pleasing to the eye.
• Unicode typography is used for characters such as quotes, ellipses, and dashes.
• All JavaScript files now specify “use strict” and are compliant with that mode.
• <label> containers are used on check boxes and radio buttons so you can click the labels as well as the boxes.
• Added the option to generate signature for pass phrases using the SHA-224 and SHA-256 hash algorithms in addition to MD5.
• Citations to books on Amazon have been updated to reference the latest editions and links changed to the current recommended format.

For complete details of the changes in this version, see the development log.

If you've been using the previous version of JavaScrypt and start to use the update, you may encounter some JavaScript errors due to incompatibility between JavaScript files stored in your browser's cache and the new HTML documents. Flushing your browser's cache and reloading the page should remedy these problems. (This shouldn't be necessary if browsers were competently implemented, but after more than twenty years seeing this done wrong, I despair of its ever being fixed.)

Posted at 23:01