Downloader: BCArchive creates mega-secure encrypted archives

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

BCArchive creates mega-secure encrypted archives

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Freeware

Archives are very easy to snoop into. Heck, Gmail looks into every ZIP archive you get, and won't let it through if it contains any executables. That's fine, and I can see the point of it.

While you can get around GMail's rudimentary checking by simply opting for a different compression format (7z, anyone?), sometimes you want a bit of extra privacy for whatever is inside your archive.

For those cases, BCArchive is just what you need. While it is a proprietary piece of software, it's freeware and it lets you use any of a vast number of established, high-security encryption algorithms. The end product is an encrypted file, either using a password or using a private/public key pair.

The resulting file can also be made executable, which means that while you would have a problem emailing it to someone else, it would be easy for you to decrypt it in the future without needing a copy of BCArchive.

Interestingly enough, I could not find PGP on the list of algorithms the program supports. Perhaps it's there, just under a different name. If there are any crypto-nerds in the audience, please enlighten me - why isn't it there, or what is it called these days if not just PGP?

BCArchive boasts very powerful encryption, but I could not find much information about its compression algorithms. It seems like compression is more of an after-thought on this one, or a way to bundle all of the files into one chunk which could be easily encrypted. Still, when you go for a solution like this, I can see why you would care more about the encryption than the compression.