Hi all,
Me and one of my friends thought of a really cool way to encrypt messages so that they are unreadable to others and we were wondering how we would check the encryption strength?
I know services like Whatsapp use message encryption so that messages are unreadable by third parties, but how would we actually test this? Is there a simple encryption checker online that we could use to test the strength of our algorithm/encrypted message?
post a couple encrypted sentences here... if someone breaks it, then it's not solid 
Offer a reward. The bigger the reward, the more numerous and smart are the people who will give it any attention.
Also, you should post your algorithm. If you are relying on the secrecy of the code which will implement your idea, you already lost.
There are no secrets.
You can only be betrayed by someone you trust.
a7
The main way to test an encryption algorithm is to publish it and let people look for mistakes.
That’s only valid if the algorithm takes a secret as part of the input.
With an algorithm for Simple things like base64 encoding or rot13 or similar Caesar cipher you would give away the solution.
Hopefully they thought of something better 
All the commonly used encryption algorithms are in the public domain. The only thing that isn't, is the user keys ("passwords"). Also the chances that you and your friend have outsmarted hundreds of years of math PHDs is very remote. So let's have some details so this can be a productive discussion.
Hi everyone, thanks for the interesting comments so far! personally, I really have no idea have people crack encrypted messages, so that's why I have no idea of knowing whether or not what we have come up with is a good idea. The original code is based on the enigma machine but, unlike the original machine, my code uses all the ASCII characters ranging from ASCII values 32 to 125.
Here is the code and the header file associated with the code:
#include "encryptor.h"
char message[] = "Hello arduino forum!!! this is my secret message";
void setup() {
Serial.begin(57600);
Serial.print(F("Original message: \""));
Serial.print(message);
Serial.println(F("\""));
encrypt(message);
Serial.print(F("Encrypted message: \""));
Serial.print(message);
Serial.println(F("\""));
rotate(rotor, ROTOR_SIZE, -1*(strlen(message)));
encrypt(message);
Serial.print(F("Decrypted message: \""));
Serial.print(message);
Serial.println(F("\""));
}
void loop() {}
and here is the encryptor.h file:
#ifndef MY_ENC
#define MY_ENC
#define OFFSET 32 //Start of "printable" characters in ASCII table
#define NUM_OF_CHARS 94 //Total num of possible chars (only including printable ones)
#define ROTOR_SIZE (sizeof(rotor)/sizeof(rotor[0]))
byte rotor[NUM_OF_CHARS] = {93, 14, 17, 91, 48, 8, 11, 57, 15, 31, 3, 72, 69, 18, 22, 77, 20, 81, 34, 6, 4, 52, 23, 79, 19, 46, 86, 29, 61, 59, 13, 64, 24, 50, 33, 87, 85, 54, 39, 40, 21, 89, 60, 45, 30, 42, 78, 58, 92, 12, 27, 82, 56, 90, 25, 62, 80, 44, 75, 7, 88, 41, 49, 53, 38, 74, 0, 67, 16, 70, 76, 26, 84, 2, 55, 63, 36, 43, 35, 83, 68, 5, 9, 51, 10, 66, 73, 71, 28, 32, 65, 47, 37, 1};
const byte reflector[NUM_OF_CHARS] = {27, 7, 85, 77, 32, 72, 21, 1, 28, 41, 29, 84, 55, 18, 51, 62, 22, 88, 13, 70, 23, 6, 16, 20, 66, 86, 74, 0, 8, 10, 60, 75, 4, 76, 90, 52, 49, 83, 69, 80, 58, 9, 46, 93, 56, 92, 42, 53, 59, 36, 91, 14, 35, 47, 78, 12, 44, 82, 40, 48, 30, 67, 15, 87, 89, 81, 24, 61, 73, 38, 19, 79, 5, 68, 26, 31, 33, 3, 54, 71, 39, 65, 57, 37, 11, 2, 25, 63, 17, 64, 34, 50, 45, 43};
//Rotates arr by turns times
void rotate(uint8_t *arr, const size_t sz, int turns){
while(turns<0)
turns += sz;
int temp[NUM_OF_CHARS] = {0};
for(unsigned int i = 0;i<sz;i++)
temp[i] = arr[i];
for(unsigned int i = 0;i<sz;i++)
arr[i] = temp[(i+turns)%sz];
return;
}
//I know arduino has built in String functions, but I avoid using String variables to avoid memory issues down the line
int indexOf(const byte *arr, const size_t sz, const int x){
for(unsigned int i = 0;i<sz;i++)
if(arr[i] == x)
return i;
return -1;
}
// encode character:
// character in -> rotor -> reflector -> rotor -> character out
// reflector array and indexOf function ensure that the same message can be reversed to get original message
// if char is outside of ASCII vals 32 to 125 then just ignore it
char encodeChar(const char c){
return ((c < OFFSET ||c > (OFFSET + NUM_OF_CHARS + 1)) ? c : OFFSET + indexOf(rotor, ROTOR_SIZE, reflector[rotor[c - OFFSET]]));
}
//encrypt *m string. After encoding a character,
//rotate rotor by 1 to ensure characters don't repeat
void encrypt(char *m){
for(unsigned int i = 0;m[i]!='\0';i++){
m[i] = encodeChar(m[i]);
rotate(rotor,ROTOR_SIZE,1);
}
return;
}
#endif //MY_ENC
After running the code, the output in my Serial terminal looks like this:
So the code works exactly as I hoped.
The reason I think that this will be hard to crack is that the only way someone could get the Encrypted message back to the original is if they knew the arrays rotor[] = {... and refelector[] = {.... Creating these arrays is not too difficult and, just like the original Enigma machine, the header file could have multiple rotors, or the rotor array itself could be generated randomly based on the date or whatever.
I am aware that the algorithm cannot return a character as itself (i.e. 'c' will never be encoded to 'c' and 'Z' will never be encoded to 'Z' and so on), but I believe that this is not an issue unless people can make educated guesses as to what I might be saying...
The Enigma was cracked around 80 years ago, using (by our standards) extremely primitive equipment.
If you are interested, C code emulating the Enigma is in the public domain. Among MANY examples: Enigma Machine Emulator · GitHub
But not just equipment. They relied on various mistakes too.
I'm not a security expert, but one weak point that I see
E.g.
12 Original message: "Hi sterretje"
12 Encrypted message: "3PZm!L}-vR1k"
14 Original message: "Hi bradley2020"
14 Encrypted message: "3PZ5l=Kxv4Yi!u"
Both encrypted messages start with the same 3 characters; in this case obviously as both unencrypted messages start with "Hi ". That can be a pointer for people to attack your algorithm.
They will need to collect sufficient messages though.
Entropy is a good stink test. If the entropy is low your "encryption" smells like month old trash.
The converse is impossible.
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