Cryptography Program

While covering cryptography in class, I wanted to make a project that reflected what we were learning. Also, I love vintage computing aesthetic so I endeavored to mix the two. The end product was a small application made from Python that takes user input and encrypts the output with a user designated passkey or computer generated passkey. The program allows you to easily copy the encoded output and passkey if needed.

Cryptography Main Screen

The program encrypts messages using Python’s Fernet encryption library which handles AES encryption and authentication securely by default. The key derivation uses a salt that is added to the passkey, and PBKDF2HMAC with SHA-256 is run at 390,000 iterations—this makes brute-force attacks more difficult. Here is an example of the program in use:

Cryptography Main Screen