Real encryption, run in your browser
This encrypts and decrypts text with a password using AES-256-GCM, the same authenticated encryption standard used in TLS, disk encryption and password managers — not a toy cipher. The password is never used as the encryption key directly; it goes through PBKDF2 with 100,000 iterations of SHA-256 first, which is what makes brute-forcing the password computationally expensive even if someone gets hold of the encrypted output.
What the output actually contains
- A random salt, so the same password never derives the same encryption key twice — this defeats precomputed rainbow-table attacks against the password.
- A random initialisation vector (IV), so encrypting the same text twice with the same password produces different ciphertext each time.
- The encrypted data itself, with a built-in authentication tag — GCM mode does not just hide the plaintext, it also detects if the ciphertext has been tampered with, and decryption will fail outright rather than silently return corrupted text.
All three are packed together into the output you copy, so decrypting only needs the password — nothing else to keep track of separately.
What password strength still matters here
PBKDF2 makes each password guess computationally expensive, but it cannot turn a weak password into a strong one — it multiplies the cost of guessing, it does not add entropy that was not there. A short dictionary word is still crackable eventually, just more slowly than without PBKDF2. Use a genuinely random passphrase of several words, or a generated password, for anything that actually needs to resist a determined attacker.
What this is, and is not, good for
- Good for: encrypting a note, a password, or a short piece of sensitive text to store somewhere or send through a channel you don't fully trust, with a password shared out of band.
- Not a replacement for: full-disk encryption, a password manager's own vault encryption, or file encryption — this handles text pasted into a box, not files or large volumes of data.
- Not recoverable if you forget the password — there is no backdoor, by design. That is what makes it real encryption rather than something with a hidden reset option.