Got questions? Maybe your question is answered below! More information is found on our help page.
Security best practice is to have one unique very strong master password for all your personal files when using password protection with strong encryption like Xecrets Ez.
For online website accounts it is different, there you indeed should have unique passwords for each site. The reason for this is that different online accounts may have different levels of security for passwords, and if you re-use passwords, weak security for one account puts all accounts with the same password at risk.
In the file encryption case, all files are encrypted with the same method. Either it is good enough, and breaking one file's encryption is no easier than another, or it is not good enough, in which case having different passwords will make no difference. Breaking the encryption of one file will be no harder than breaking another. Nothing is gained by having different passwords for different files.
It is also impractical to securely handle separate passwords that are strong enough for every file in your head, so then you need a password manager or a similar function. This, in turn, then will have a single password or be a single point of attack. So this just moves the single password situation to a different place, which does not gain you any security, but it may reduce it if the password manager turns out to be vulnerable. This just complicates things without any security gain.
Xecrets Ez does allow you to set separate passwords for different files, but this is intended for sharing situations, where you share the encrypted file with others.
Xecrets Ez uses strong encryption algorithms to ensure your files are secure. The specific algorithms used include AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard) for encryption of the actual file contents and RSA-4096 (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) for asymmetric encryption used in sharing scenarios. For ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the files we use SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm) in keyed hashing.
There are many good choices for encryption algorithms. We have chosen to use AES-256 and RSA-4096 because they are widely regarded as secure and efficient. In the future we may consider supporting additional algorithms as needed.
While there is a movement towards post-quantum cryptography, we believe that AES-256 and RSA-4096 are currently sufficient for file encryption and we believe that it may be more risky to hurry adoption of new algorithms without thorough testing and validation. AES-256 is generally considered to be quantum-resistant, while RSA-4096 may need to be replaced with a post-quantum algorithm in the future. We are continuously monitoring the landscape and will adapt our approach as necessary.
Yes, Xecrets works perfectly with cloud services. You can encrypt any file on your computer, and upload or synchronize it to your cloud service of choice. As long as the cloud service can store a file, it can store a file encrypted with Xecrets.
Since all Xecrets apps run entirely locally on your own devices, and they never communicate with any cloud based services, or own or anyone else's, they are by definition zero-knowledge. When you synchronize or upload files encrypted with Xecrets to the cloud, the cloud provider can't read the files, and neither can we.
Yes, with some limitations. For groups of more than 5 users, please contact us at support. You will need to provide us with a list of email addresses for each member of the group, we will invoice you and after the invoice is paid, we'll send you the licenses via email for further redistribution to your team. This will need to be redone each year, there is currently no automatic renewal for group purchases.
If you are happy to pay with our payment processor Stripe, you can in some cases use other payment methods. Initiate the purchase, and see what options are presented.
If you still want to pay with something else, please contact our support team. We try to be flexible so just ask us, but there is no automatic recurring payment for the subscription, so in the future you need to contact us each time the license expires and arrange for payment again. It may also take longer time, since we'll have to handle it and verify the payment manually. We ask, for everyone's convenience that you consider prepaying for 2 or 3 years.