Your life is full of sensitive data, that's for sure. Things you care about, things that simply cannot be known by others, or - well, maybe even things that are better left private. Internet accounts, PINs, codes, small documents - it would be nice to have a place where to store them with the security that only you can access them, and that you will be able to access them wherever you are. Enter Jafe, a small program that will do exactly this for you: store your sensitive data, securely, conveniently, and that lets you access them an a wide range of computer systems.

Features

Jafe is a small Java application designed to keep your sensitive data (text notes, accounts, small files) organized in an intuitive and easy-to-use way, with an heavy stress on security. It's designed to be accessible on as many systems as possible, exploiting its Java nature and the very small size of the application itself.

I develop and regularly use it on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, under Java 1.5; it should work just the same on all the other operative systems that support Java 1.4.2 or later. It probably will work on other VMs, as well; let me know if you test it.

It features:

  • Ease of use: Jafe is easy to use, because the informations are stored in a convenient tree structure, with an intuitive interface. You can add free text, accounts, small files; everything will be stored on the same place - compressed and encrypted. Easy and safe.

  • Security: Jafe uses the best strong encription algorithms available, to guarantee that, once you save them, no one other than you will be able to access your data. It is designed with plausible deniability in mind: the produced file will look just like random data to anyone without the key to it, making it impossible to demonstrate it even contains data.

  • Portability: Jafe is written in Java, fully compliant with the 1.4.2 virtual machine (and later ones, like 1.5.0). For this reason, it can be used on Linux, Windows, *BSD, Mac computers, and behaves just the same on every one of them. Moreover, it doesn't depend on any external library, and i't very small - ideal to keep it with you on an USB key.

  • Freedom: Jafe is Free Software, licensed under a BSD license; full source code is available. This basically mean you can review the software as you like (to ensure it does what you expect it to do), so you can be sure there are no backdoor or weaknesses - and patch them if you do find some. Moreover, I plan to make the code compliant with the latest Free Software Java environments, like GCJ, to provide a fully Free-as-in-Free-Speech experience.

  • Flexibility: You can save your data as regular files, or embed them into an image. Just think about it: take an image, whatever - and hide your sensitive data in it. Then you can use the resulting file the way you want - desktop background, or for a site... you'll be the only one to know it's your data they're seeing. The image will look the same! They call it steganography. It means flexibility.

Downloads

Latest version:

In this version, many bugfixes and performance improvements have been performed.

Most noticeably, the embed-into-image function now allows to specify a password; a crash of the application when saving a file attachment node without a file has been solved; the OS X file dialogs are now uniform through all the application.

Here it is the public key you can use to verify the signatures on the files (available from v. 0.6 on).

Version 0.8, 31 October 2006:

Application Jar (250 Kb, PGP/GPG sig.): this is the JAR file you can use to launch the application. If your Java installation is fine, you should be able to double-click on it, and here you go.

Full archive (445 Kb, PGP/GPG sig.): archive containing the full Java sources and build scripts, as well as the JAR file.

OSX Application Bundle (306 Kb, PGP/GPG sig.): OS X style application bundle, to enjoy Jafe as a native application under Mac OS X.

Older versions:

Version Rel. date Full distribution PGP Signature
 
0.7 3 June 2006 Jafe-0.7.zip (444 Kb) Here
0.6 24 May 2006 Jafe-0.6.zip (373 Kb) Here
0.5 14 May 2006 Jafe-0.5.zip (497 Kb) --
0.4 2 May 2006 Jafe-0.4.zip (456 Kb) --
0.3 24 Apr 2006 Jafe-0.3.zip (436 Kb) --
0.2 19 Apr 2006 Jafe-0.2.zip (466 Kb) --
0.1 16 Apr 2006 Jafe-0.1-src.zip (249 Kb) --

Sources repository:

If you want the latest snapshot, you can get the sources via Subversion from here:

https://jafe.dev.java.net/source/browse/jafe/

Then you can compile them using Ant, via the jafe-build.xml build file included.

Technicalia

Encryption

The following algorithms are supported when saving a file:

  • AES (Rijndael 128)
  • Twofish (AES competition finalist)
  • Serpent (AES competition finalist)
  • Camellia (NESSIE program selected algorithm)

All the algorithms are used on 128-bit blocks of data, with 128-bit keys. The algorithms are used in CTR mode of operation, as a stream cipher.

The key is generated from user-supplied data using the PBKDF2 algorithm, as described in PKCS #5 v.2.0, with an IC (iteration count) of 2048.

Compression

The following algorithms are supported when saving a file:

  • Deflate (i.e. used in ZIP/GZIP)
  • BWCA (Burrows-Wheeler, used in BZip2)

License

Jafe is Free Software, and it's licensed under the BSD License.

Copyright (c) 2006 Germano Rizzo

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Jafe uses portions of third party Free Software, whose license you can find in the README file in the source archive.

Support (you)

Jafe don't have (for now) a mailing list, nor a forum, nor a wiki. Please write me for any question you have.

Support (me)

Jafe is free - both as in free speech and as in free beer. Still, it is made possible by long hours of (my) work. You're free to use it, and take its code for whatever purpose you can imagine; but if you find it useful, please consider to donate via PayPal. I'll be grateful, and Jafe will continue to grow and improve. Thanks.

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