filou

Filou

cryptography (without) loophole

Filou is in devlopment. It is not yet a super hyper cool program but we are going there.

the name

Filou is my brother, Charles Philippe Amyot, child nickname. He died the 9th octobre 2014. This program is dedicated to his memory.

Use case

Filou is the npm for cryptography. It revolutionizes the way the people use cryptography on a everyday use. The general design is to do what programs like npm did for dependencies management but for cryptography.

Filou user interface is a command line user interface (CLI) and its source code. For us, the readability of the source code is as important as the functionality of the software.

using filou

creating keys

The first thing you want to do when using filou is to create your personal private-public key pair. your keys will be kept in your ~/.filou directory.

filou createkey

Then, you might want to publish your public key to the public repository

filou publish -email alice@lechef.com

encrypting file

To encrypt a file to send to bob@lechef.com, you can do the following things

1. if bob@lechef.com's public key is on the public repository, you can simply use

   filou encrypt -to bob@lechef.com -file mysecretdocument.doc -out mycypherdoc.cyp
   

2. if bob@lechef.com's public key is on your local file path you can use

   filou encrypt -to /path/to/bob@lechef.com -file mysecretdocument.doc -out mycypherdoc.cyp
   

3. if bob@lechef.com's public key is on accessible on a public url you can use

   filou encrypt -to https://example.com/path/to/bob@lechef.com -file mysecretdocument.doc -out mycypherdoc.cyp
   

In anycase, the command line output will be a cypher file called mycypherdoc.cyp. You are then responsible to send the file to its recipient by the mean you wish; email, dropbox, floppy disc...

decrypting file

Once you received a file encrypted_file.cyp, you can decrypt it via the following command.

filou decrypt encrypted_file.cyp

so you want to hack filou

That's cool because it is made for that! That you are a high school student with basic programming knownledge, a math student that wants to see an implementation of cryptographic algorithm or a senior security engineer, we welcome you!

Before everything, you will need to learn a little bit of Go. We really like the official go tour because you do not need to download or install anything; everything runs in your web browser. Then, you only need to dig into the code!

We are proud of our source code. The unit test code coverage is almost 100%. All the functions are bellow 10 line of code. So if you do not understand a small piece of code, just look at its unit tests.

All our file formats are well documented yaml files. You can open any file and read the comments and make sure everything make sense.

first road map

• make a simple web service to use as remote key location
• make blue print for the file

things to do not forget

In the long run, there are some things we will want to do and we need not to forget about it or lock ourselves out of those goals.

• Use many encryption algorithms (symetrics, asymetrics, modes and hashes)
• Has many keys for the same email
• Rotate its keys
• Encrypt a file to many people at the same time
• Keys could be some where else like in npm
• Using threshold cryptography
• make a neet web site like npm.org to store keys
• make alias for known public keys
• make it easy for rapper applications