Review: R10Cipher

I'm always interested in cryptography, protecting passwords with other passwords, and other such geekery. I've tried 'em all, from the excellent 1Password on the Mac to the almost useful  KeePass ("the password protector with the terrible name"). From the somewhat nerve-wracking LastPass web service  to the bottomlessly paranoid trueCrypt. So when I heard about r10Cipher I had to check it out. In less time than it would take you to say "free evaluation copy"  I had downloaded the program and was trying it out.

Which brings us to the first high point: the developer is friendly and responsive. He worked with me to get through some initial setup bugs on my Windows 7 laptop, with responses coming less than two hours from most of my emails. The odds of most people having similar problems are low, as my test environment is "unique" to say the least, and many programs (Ruby, MySQL, and sqlite3 to name a few. I should probably just wipe it and start over. But that's neither here nor there.) have run into trouble on that machine. When I installed on a less-unique laptop the setup was quick and painless.

R10Cipher (by the way, the developer's company name is  Arten Science, and he tells us that "R10" is a play on "Arten", which I think is a play on "Art and", making this the first software program with a DOUBLE PUN in the name. +2 cool points just for that.) runs from a single directory, making it easily stored on and used from a flash drive: no registry changes, no install directories, everything is in one place and pleasantly un-cluttered and un-annoying.

Which is also true of the interface. Clean, simple, and intuitive, it provides you with a number of easy to use and easy to love options for encrypting text files, address book entries, even emails. With the pleasantly modest cost of the software it's easy to picture this application taking its place in a law firm, medical office, or any other place that needs to be able to email sensitive information without worrying that it's being read en route. The software is true cross-platform (Mac/Win/Lin) so you can send files to anybody that needs them and be sure they will be able to open them.

Internally, R10Cipher uses Blowfish encryption, which is comforting. One of my main concerns in testing out new encryption options is the worry that they're using some proprietary encryption method that turns out to be roughly as secure as Pig Latin. (Note: don't translate the word "Password" into Pig Latin in front of your mother.)

The one shortcoming isn't really a shortcoming: Lack of easy browser integration. 1Password is still my password safe of choice. But R10Cipher wasn't meant to be a password management utility, so comparing it to 1Password et al is comparing apples to oranges.

Overall, If I were to create a star ranking system R10Cipher would get a solid 4.5 of five stars.  The half-star being taken off for the somewhat awkward name. ;) If you have a need for simple but robust security, you need to give R10Cipher a look.