What is Lokkat?

Lokkat is an encryption software. It has been published as free software using the GNU GPL v3 license. Lokkat allows you to encrypt your files using the one-time pad encryption. This makes it possible to achieve a degree of security surpassing that of more common encryption algorithms.

What do I need this for?

If there are files on your computer you would like to protect from unauthorized access, you can use Lokkat to protect them with strong encryption.

To achieve this it makes sense to use a software that is not a "black box", meaning: its operation is transparent and it does not handle your data in a potentially unsafe manner. Because of this, Lokkat was released as free software. Real trust in software can only exist the user is given the opportunity to examine its mode of operation.

Screenshot of Lokkat

How does it work?

Lokkat is using one-time pad cryptography to encrypt your files. To achieve this Lokkat is utilizes random data from two possible sources (for now):

pseudorandom numbers from the cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) of your OS
True random numbers from quantum fluctuation in a vacuum: its source is an experiment by the Australian National University.

Here you can read more on Lokkat's algorithm. If you would like to know more about the degree of secrecy achievable with Lokkat you might want to read the section "How safe is Lokkat?" in its user manual file.

How does Lokkat work?

Lokkat can protect your files from unauthorized access by using the OTP encryption.

The top design goal during Lokkat's development was to make the in principle complex topic of cryptography accessible and available to the public utilizing a very easy to use user interface.

Why was Lokkat developed?

Lokkat originated from a command line tool which I wrote to encrypt my diary. When a friend mentioned he might also have use for something like that, I had the idea to develop a frontend to simplify using the software. And that became Lokkat.

Additionally it was a great opportunity to familiarize myself with Python, Qt, software licensing and free software.

What do I need to use Lokkat?

A computer with either MS Windows or GNU/Linux. Because Lokkat's source code is available to the public, you could get it to run on pretty much any system capable of of running Python 3.7 and Qt 5, for example MacOS. Because most of you will probably be more familiar and comfortable with running precompiled binaries, Lokkat in that form is currently only available for Windows (7/8/10) and GNU/Linux.

In which languages is Lokkat available?

English and German. If someone would like to help translate Lokkat into more languages, this can easily be done by using a software provided by Qt called "Linguist".

Translating Lokkat into a new language takes probably about half an hour.

Dilligent polyglots can contact me here. VERY dilligent polyglots can of course just fork the source code ;-)

What was used to develop Lokkat?

Programming languages: Python
Markup languages: Markdown, HTML
IDE: PyCharm
Text editors: micro, Atom, Notepad++, Mousepad
Frameworks: PyQt5, Qt Installer Framework
Tools: Qt Creator, Qt Designer, Qt Linguist, PyInstaller
Version control system: git
OS: GNU/Linux, Windows
and about 200 man hours of work for the application and website combined

How do I get Lokkat?

Well, by clicking here.