Originally posted by: PokerGuy
Truecrypt is great for encrypting disks/partitions etc, but what about an app that can encrypt a single file (doesn't even need to use public key or key pair, even a simple pre-shared pw would be fine). How about something that will let you encrypt text that you could then paste into an email or IM etc? Any suggestions?
There are archivers like 7-zip that can handle one file or several:
http://www.7-zip.org/
Also there's gpg which can encrypt or sign a file with a public/private key system.
http://www.gnupg.org/
For just a string of text, that's a little harder since typically encrypted output is composed
of all possible binary byte values, not all of which you'd typically be able to paste into most programs... i.e. the encrypted data is binary not text.
So then you'd have to convert that to ASCII or another unicode type acceptable character set that can be pasted and transmitted without data loss, typically by encoding it in ASCII-HEX or Base64 or whatever.
Also for the recipient to be able to decode it, they'd need the same key in a shared private key system or you'd have to encrypt it with their public key in a public key system.
It might be easier to use an IM system that already can use some kind of encryption like some JABBER clients can (AFAIK) if that is sufficiently secure and useful for you.
Otherwise you'd probably want to use something like GPG followed by some kind of binary to text converter like some email message formatting options for it will do to get your readable / copy-paste text.
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