As far as the law allows, this service comes as is, without any warranty or condition, and the provider will not be liable to you for any damages arising out of the use or nature of the service, under any kind of legal claim.
This is a hobby project. I don’t recommend using it in situations where reliability is critical. It’s your responsibility to have a backup plan if the service goes down.
For any time you want to lock up a piece of text and not let anyone (even yourself) access it for a while! Stage a big reveal. Make a digital time capsule. Hide your insta password from yourself for a day.
Type or paste some text in the box, choose a time, and click Encrypt. An encrypted message will appear. Save the entire message, including the lines that start with “#” and “-,” in a safe place. When it’s time to decrypt it, come back to this page and paste it into the box.
The server has a public and private key for every timestamp within the next year, with 15-minute granularity. There’s a key pair for January 1, 12:00 AM, another key pair for January 1, 12:15 AM, another for January 1, 12:30 AM, and so on.
This website looks up the public key for the time you selected, and uses it to encrypt your data. Once the time arrives, the server publishes the corresponding private key, allowing you to decrypt the data.
Network requests are only used for looking up the keys, and the same keys are used for everyone. This means your data is encrypted and decrypted without ever leaving your device, which helps preserve your privacy. It also means the keys can be served from a global CDN, which reduces latency and hosting costs.
Since the keys are the same for everyone, anyone who has your encrypted data can decrypt it after the private key is published. Don’t share the encrypted text anywhere you wouldn’t share the decrypted text — once someone has the text, you can’t revoke their ability to decrypt it in the future.
Also, the system is not designed to prevent governments, lawyers, or rogue employees of the hosting company from accessing the unpublished keys.
You can integrate this service with your own code. The API returns keys in
the form of
age
recipient and identity files. You can use these keys with the
age command line tool, as well as any of the compatible
libraries, which are available for various programming languages.
To try it out, first
install the age tool. Then, to encrypt a file named mydata.txt until March 26, 2025 at 6pm
(in the time zone UTC-7, a.k.a. Pacific Daylight Time):
To decrypt your file on or after that time:
The above commands use the binary age format for encrypted files.
If, instead, you want an encrypted text file in the same format
this website produces, add the --armor flag. For example:
The above commands are written for the bash and
zsh shells. If you’re using fish, then instead
of <(curl ...) you should use
(curl ... | psub).
This service doesn’t collect your personal information, nor does it use cookies or other methods of tracking individual people’s activity. I don’t sell or share information about you with any company.
The infrastructure providers DigitalOcean and CloudFlare may log your IP address and encryption key timestamps because your device communicates with the service through their networks. They might use cookies for security purposes. You can read their privacy policies to learn how they use your information.
Why is this website encrypt.day instead of encrypt.date?
Some content filters are pre-configured to block any website that ends
with
.date, so I felt it would be more reliable to use encrypt.day
as the brand for this website. You can still go to encrypt.date and it’ll
redirect here.
How is this website related to the age open source
project?
This website uses code from the age project, but they are
otherwise separate and maintained by different people. The latter happens
to be named “age,” but it doesn’t have anything to do with the “age” of
the encrypted text. In fact, the author of the tool pronounces it
“ah-ghe,” not like the English word “age.”