Elite Encryption Algorithm (Swift Implementation)

Table of Contents

• About
• Setup
• Building
• Usage

About

This is an implementation of the Elite Encryption Algorithm (EEA), in Swift, that allows you to generate keys, encrypt, and decrypt data. If you want a breakdown of how the algorithm works and how keys are generated, check out my blog post

Warning

This implementation encrypts your keys via password. There are some checks to help make sure you enter your password correctly, but it is not full-proof.

Setup

You first need to install Swift. For install instructions refer to the offical Swift documentation.

If you are on Windows, the easiest way I found to build the project is to make sure you are using the x64 Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt and enabling Developer Mode in the Settings under System.

Building

You can build either release or debug variants. Though, it is recommend to build the release version for greater optimization and smaller file size.

# Build release
make release

# Build debug
make debug

The resulting executable will be placed in the root of this directory.

Note

If you are on Windows, use nmake instead of make.

Usage

This implementation utilizes a command-line interface (CLI) to allow you to manage your keys as well as encrypt and decrypt data.

Configuration

When you run EEA, it will create a config file, eea.conf, if one doesn't already exist. This is where you can specify where EEA should look for your .keys files, or the files that store your keys used for encryption and decryption

Key Generation

The CLI gives you the ability to generate your own keys as well as delete them if you choose to do so. When you create a new set of keys, the app will prompt you to choose how many keys you would like to generate and how long you want your keys to be. After which, it will prompt you to enter a password so your keys can be encrypted.

Like the C and Java implementations, you are able to have as many key files as you like and can select which one to use at the time of encryption and decryption.

Encryption and Decryption

Both encryption and decryption modes allow you to encrypt or decrypt single files, directories, or strings of text. The directories are encrypted recursively, so any and all files inside that directory will be encrypted. As for decryption, only .eea files will be decrypted, but, like with encryption, decryption is done recursively when performed on directories.

Ghost Mode

All encryption and decryption methods have a mode called Ghost Mode. In Ghost Mode, you have the ability to either manually enter (in the case of decryption) or create one-time-use keys. Ghost Mode does not utilize any of your saved keys files, nor does it generate a new one. The reason it is called "Ghost Mode" is so your encryption/decryption are like a ghost and your keys only ever exist in memory. Meaning, the keys can never be recovered, even by data recovery, since they were never saved to your hard drive/solid-state drive. The only way you would be able to decrypt data encrypted with Ghost Mode is if you manually copied the keys yourself and then manually re-entered them using Ghost Mode to decrypt.