So lately I have been trying to keep better records of my spending habits to better understand my financial status. This means I have been recording all my bills, when they were paid, all my receipts for everything from food to gas, entertainment to clothes. I got this idea from my cousin who has been doing this for some time and I just made my own modified version based off his spreadsheet. I carry this spreadsheet with me on my 4gb thumb drive along with some useful apps, some music, Xampp and a few other things. What happens if I lose my thumb drive accidentally? Whoever finds it could then go through all this information and do what they please with it.

Since I work for a company on a system that uses different forms of authentication and encryption for sensitive data I decided to take my first attempt at a simple yet effective encryption tool for my Financial spreadsheet. This actually turned out pretty good in that it can be used on roughly any type of file and is so jumbled that unless the person trying to decrypt the info has your passkey, they data is gone! Any how the name of the file is EncDec.vbs and as you can see is written in VBScript and can be run by double clicking the file. Since the VBScript isn’t compiled and can be seen by anyone you would think that someone could simply reverse the code to decrypt the file, but without the passkey it is not likely at all.

For now I will post the script itself, which walks you through encrypting the file of your choice using pop-up boxes and is pretty straight forward.

First you are presented with a screen that will determine whether you want to Encrypt or Decrypt a file. Second you will be prompted for a file in which you want to encrypt or decrypt. If you place the script in the directory where your file is, you don’t need to include the path. Third you will be asked for a new file name that the encrypted/decrypted file will be saved as. This is handy because then you aren’t over writing the original file until you can verify your encryption, then it is up to you if you want to delete the original or not. Last, it will ask you for a passkey/passphrase. This is essentially your password for the encryption. Make sure you remember this, because if you don’t you won’t be able to decrypt your file!!

The source code is commented if you are interested in how it works and I plan to post a tutorial on how it was built at some point as well. I have the tutorial page with the formatted code created I just need to create some more examples on how it works. Hope that someone else finds this useful!