AxCrypt - Encryption Made Easy

There are tons of ways to encrypt your personal files and protect them from prying eyes. These range from using simple methods like creating password protected archives using an ubiquitous app like Winzip to using programs specializing in encryption like PGP to using alternative encryption techniques like steganography. No matter how we protect our data, most of us would agree that encryption is an extremely essential tool that one needs to possess.

While all the above mentioned methods get the job done, nothing quite beats shell context based encryption utilities for sheer convenience where all you have to do is right-click a file(s) or folder(s) anywhere in Windows and simply select encrypt to get the job done. I'm covering two shell context encryption utilities in this post, one is full-featured & versatile, the other deserves atleast an honorable mention. Besides being explorer shell extensions, these utilities share one more thing in common, both of them are free.

AxCrypt is definitely the more
complete utility covered here. Besides the usual encrypt & decrypt functions it lets you
'encrypt a copy' meaning, the original file is left untouched and an encrypted copy of it is created. It also lets you shred any file. Files deleted in Windows can often be recovered even after the Recycle Bin is emptied, Windows doesn't offer you direct access to these files but all or part of the data they contained is not physically removed from the hard drive and can be recovered by someone using the right tools. Shredding is a secure deletion technique used to ensure that the files are deleted in the true sense of the word. AxCrypt will optionally remember a password for encryption and/or decryption if you ask it to. It will retain the remembered password till you restart Windows or ask it to stop remembering it. When you click on an encrypted file, it will ask you for the password (assuming you've chosen not to have it remember a default decryption password); once you supply it with the password the file opens with its associated program. You can edit the file and when you close it the file goes back to its encrypted state. This whole process is completely seamless. AxCrypt even lets you create encrypted standalone .exe archives to send files to somebody who doesn't have AxCrypt installed on their system. The receiving party only needs to know the password to access the files. It has a 'Rename' function which changes a file's name to something random, the original name is restored automatically on decryption. It also lets you use a keyfile instead of a password. And all these functions are easily accessible directly from any file's right-click menu. All files encrypted are automatically compressed. A progress status is shown during encryption/decryption. AxCrypt even possesses a versatile command line interface for advanced automated encryption. To say that AxCrypt is full-featured would probably be an understatement. The clincher is that AxCrypt is an Open Source utility, which means you'll never have to worry about backdoors. It uses AES encryption with 128-bit keys .

AxCrypt is as close to perfect as a utility can get in its category. So why am I covering another utility? In one word: speed. Because AxCrypt is so thorough about what it does, it is slightly encumbered. It would not be fair to describe it as slow but if you need to encrypt and decrypt a whole lot of data on a regular basis, you will feel the pinch.

Cryptext is a no-frills utility that relies on a combination of SHA-1 and RC4 to encrypt files using a 160-bit key. It offers nothing much besides blazing fast encryption & decryption. Though it has not been updated for several years now, there are people who still swear by this utility, yours truly included. For a quick encryption fix, nothing quite beats Cryptext.

AxCrypt Home --- Download v1.6.3 [1.01 MB]
Download Cryptext v3.4 [188 KB]