Windows Phone Thoughts: Tales from Encrypt: SecureNow 2006 v1.00 Reviewed

Strangely, after the encryption completed, the program hung for a few seconds while it “remapped”. I assume was again scanning the device to present the explorer view interface.


Figure 10: SecureNow apparently re-scanning my device to render the explorer view.

Frustratingly, I was returned to the root of the explorer view and had to navigate back to the location of the text file to see the results of the encryption.


Figure 11: Back at the top of the explorer view. I had to navigate back to the location of my file.

I found that my original text file was changed to a new file (now 112 bytes in size) with this naming convention <original file name>(<original file extension>).sit (so shopping.txt became shopping(txt).sit). Furthermore, when I opened the encrypted text file in Word Mobile, the contents were garbled. Copying the file to my laptop and opening it there also resulted in an unreadable document.


Figure 12: The contents of the text file after encryption.

I then copied a PDF file (621 KB in size) to my storage card to test. I found that the navigation tree in SecureNow 2006 was not able to see the PDF file in its tree. I had to exit the application and then re-open it which then allowed the PDF file to show up in the tree which proves that the application does do a full device scan to populate its explorer view. I encrypted the PDF file (which took several seconds longer than encrypting the text file. In fact, a screen that I did not see during the text file encryption since it happened so fast, was now viewable and contained an indicator that encryption was in progress.


Figure 13: Encrypting the PDF file.

The operation resulted in a new file (also 621 KB) that followed the same naming convention used in the text file. Going back to the text file, I tried changing the extension of the encrypted text file back to .TXT to see if I could easily circumvent the encryption. This resulted in a text file with unreadable information inside of it.

I now had two files that I was unable to read on my device. How easy it would be to reverse the encryption and return them to a readable state?