You Can Now Turn Messages Into Secret Code Using Emoji by Joon Ian Wong.
From the post:
Emoji are developing into their own language, albeit a sometimes impenetrable one. But they are about to become truly impenetrable. A new app from the Mozilla Foundation lets you use them for encryption.
The free web app, called Codemoji, lets users write a message in plain-text, then select an emoji “key” to mask the letters in that message with a series of emoji. To decrypt a message, the correct key must be entered in the app, turning emoji back into the alphabet.
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Caesar ciphers (think letter substitution) are said to be “easy” to solve with modern computers.
Which is true, but the security of an Emoji cipher depends on how long the information must remain secret.
For example, you discover a smart phone at 11:00 AM (your local) and it has the following message:
Detonate at 12:15 P.M. (your local)
but that message is written in Emoji using the angry face as the key:
That Emoji coded message is as secure as a message encoded with the best the NSA can provide.
Why?
If you knew what the message said, detonation time, assuming that is today, is only 75 minutes away. Explosions are public events and knowing in hindsight that you had captured the timing message, but broke the code too late, isn’t all that useful.
The “value” of that message being kept secret expires at the same time as the explosion.
In addition to learning more about encryption, use Codemoji as a tool for thinking about your encryption requirements.
Some (conflicting) requirements: Ease of use, resistance to attack (how to keep the secret), volume of use, hardware/software requirements, etc.
Everyone would like to have brain-dead easy to use, impervious to even alien-origin quantum computers, scales linearly and runs on an Apple watch.
Not even the NSA is rumored to have such a system. Become informed so you can make informed compromises.