With OpenPGP Applet you can encrypt text with a passphrase using the passphrase encryption of OpenPGP.

It is unsafe to write confidential text in a web browser since JavaScript attacks can access it from inside the browser. You should rather write your text in a separate application, encrypt it using OpenPGP Applet, and paste the encrypted text in your browser, before sending it by email for example.

When using OpenPGP Applet to encrypt emails, non-ASCII characters (for example non-Latin characters or characters with accents) might not display correctly to the recipients of the email.

If you are going to encrypt emails often, we recommend you to set up Thunderbird instead.

This technique requires you to share a secret passphrase with the people who will decrypt the text. OpenPGP also allows you to use public-key cryptography to send confidential messages without having a shared passphrase. See the corresponding documentation.

  1. Write your text in a text editor. Do not write it in the web browser!

    Click on OpenPGP Applet and choose Open Text Editor to open gedit.

  2. Select the text that you want to encrypt. To copy it into the clipboard, right-click (on Mac, click with two fingers) on the selected text and choose Copy from the menu.

    OpenPGP Applet now shows lines of text, meaning that the clipboard contains non-encrypted text:

  3. Click on OpenPGP Applet and select Encrypt Clipboard with Passphrase from the menu.

    If you receive the error message “The clipboard does not contain valid input data”, try to copy your text again, starting from step 2.

  4. In the Passphrase dialog box, enter a passphrase of your choice. Repeat the same passphrase in the second dialog box.

  5. OpenPGP Applet now shows a padlock, meaning that the clipboard contains encrypted text:

  6. To paste the encrypted text into another application, right-click (on Mac, click with two fingers) in the application where you want to paste it and choose Paste from the menu.

    For example, you can paste it into the web browser to send it by email.

    Encrypted text starting with -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----