Bats' Needlessly Complicated Encryption (BNCE)
BNCE was my attempt at creating a fun and (not) military-grade encryption system. The idea was to encrypt plaintext by transforming it into a different set of words. These words were fetched from a words.txt file containing 10,000 unique words that I found on GitHub.
I spent hours scratching my head during school, but the result was satisfying and helped me develop technical thinking, problem-solving skills, and a deeper understanding of encryption concepts.
Implementation Details
Since there are more than 10,000 imaginable words, I couldn’t simply map each character to another word directly during the encryption process. Instead, I designed the encryption to transform every two characters into a word from the 10,000-word list. The assignment was based on the line number of the word.
The line number was calculated using the ASCII value of the first character, multiplied by a number larger than the second character could ever be to ensure determinism when summing both. This result was then added with hash sum of either the initial passphrase or the previous result, if there is one.
I didn't know about cipher block chaining back then and how it is used in common encryption like AES, so you could say great minds think alike :)
Visualization
I created a rough visualization of the encryption process. Though it’s a bit outdated (showing an earlier, less refined version), it can still help explain the basic workings of BNCE.
Preview
Encrypt and Decrypt with Correct Passphrase
Watch the encryption and decryption process work flawlessly with the correct passphrase:
Encrypt and Decrypt with Incorrect Passphrase
See how the encrypted text gets decrypted into nonsense with the wrong passphrase:
A live demonstration is also accessible at bnce.bats.li, however due to limiations from my server provider it only works in the numerical mode, which only shows the line number instead of the word. It's also kind of my fault for implementing it in PHP and probably very memory inefficient, which is why this limitation comes into place.
Written: 2024-09-21