Textsafe Provides 10 Ciphers to Keep Text Messages Private

Posted by Sierra Monica B. in Security on 10 30th, 2009 | no responses

Ellis Video, a developer of innovative applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch mobile handsets, released Textsafe.
Textsafe is a cool application destined to users who want to send and receive private messages that no one can read if it happens that others to get their hands on the handset.
It allows you to encode and decode text messages via email, choosing from ten different ciphers.
Supported ciphers are: Morse Code, Vigenere, Caesar, Playfair, ROT13, ADFGVX, Affine, Trifid, Railfence and Tap Code. The Morse Code and Tap Code are for audible ciphers, for playing messages aloud, while some of the ciphers use one or more passwords and can be decrypted only if the receiver knows them. The receiver can then send messages back choosing the same code or a different one.

The Morse Code is based on rhythm and can be used with sounds, pulses, marks and flashing lights to represent dashes and dots.
The Vigenere Cipher uses poly-alphabetic substitution, similar with Caesar ciphers, while Playfair uses pairs of letters instead of single letters.
ROT13’s name comes from “rotate by 13 places” and is a substitution cipher used in online communities to hide spoilers, offensive language and puzzle solutions by replacing each letter with the 13th character following after in the alphabet.
ADFGVX is more powerful and was used in the World War I by the German Army. It uses fractionating transposition and a Polybius square.
Affine is a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher based on the old Cesar cipher, ROT13 and a code called Atbash. It maps the letters of an m-sized alphabet to integers ranging between 0… m-1. The formula used to encrypt each letter is E(x)=(ax+b) mod m.
Even if it uses mathematics, it is considered to be a weak cipher.
Trifid is a more complex trigraphic substitution-based cipher, while the Railfence, known as the zigzag cipher, is a transposition cipher type that encrypts letters in zigzag.
Tap Code is used today in the communication between prisoners. Each letter is represented by two numbers in a coordinate.

The Textsafe application also includes two sections called History and How To, which teach the user how to use each code, providing the option of sending standard text messages via Text Safe.
It is now available at the Apple App Store and at Ellis Vigeo.