I was playing with OpenSSL at work today. Turns out that you can encipher stuff right from the command line. It's pretty cool.

To encrypt something, do this:

    /usr/bin/openssl bf-cfb -salt -a

Then you enter the password twice, then the text you want to encrypt, then ctrl+d to finish. You should see some encrypted text. To decrypt that text run this:

    /usr/bin/openssl bf-cfb -d -a

Then it'll ask you for the password and then the ciphertext. Hit enter and then ctrl+d when done. You should see plain text.

You could use this as a hinky messaging system. All you'd need is a one-time pad scheme to figure up the password and you'd be able to send ciphertext via email or IM securely. Of course, you could use a GPG or SSL-aware client, but not all of them are (GAIM isn't, for example).