I Built A Light And Easy to Use PGP Encryption Tool: Here's How

I once needed to generate a PGP key pair and I thought that I could maybe create my own tool in order to do so.

Learning by doing being my preferred approach, I built aliceandbob.io! 🚀

To make it short, aliceandbob.io is a free, light and easy-to-use PGP encryption tool based on OpenPGP.js, an open source implementation of openPGP.

I made aliceandbob.io open source so that we can all learn from it!

Let's take a look to the available and upcoming features!

Features currently available

Encryption features

The app gives you the possibility to:

• generate PGP key pairs (elliptic-curve cryptography(ECC)),
• encrypt messages with a public PGP key, and
• decrypt messages with your private key.

Available params for encryption

Keys are currently generated with the following params:

• your email, and
• your passphrase.

Additional features

• download your keys in 

  .txt

   format, and
• copy/past your keys easily.

Tech used

• HTML & CSS as for the basis of the web app
• Javascript for the encryption logic
• Stimulus.js, a Javascript framework, simple and modern
• Ruby & Ruby on rails as I think it would be the easiest way to implement further back-end features and it is currently my favorite web-app framework

The whole encryption logic is built with Javascript. Stimulus.js is used to connect to the HTML elements and retrieve the user inputs. Don't hesitate to check the Github repo to see how it is implemented.

For this project, I decided to rely on OpenPGP.js, a JavaScript implementation of the OpenPGP protocol.

What about future developments?

At this stage, no need to install anything, the tool is web-based and the encryption logic is fully client-side.

Of course, at some point, a desktop implementation would be great as it stays the most secure way to generate PGP keys!

The web app is regularly updated and the possibility to choose the type of elliptic curve for encryption will be soon added, as well as the possibility to upload your public keys to HKP servers.

aliceandbob.io is open source

This project is open source, so feel free to take a look at the Github repository, watch it, fork it, star it! 🌟

Don't hesitate to talk about aliceandbob.io around you!

If you like the app and would like it to be improved, please consider buying me a coffee ☕! It would help me a lot for the server and domain costs.

I hope you will like it and do not hesitate to let me know if you have any feedback, questions or improvements to suggest!

Thank you all for reading this article, I hope you enjoyed it! 😊