When you have a lot of online accounts to handle and don't have enough time to memorize all the passwords it becomes an annoying problem. What if you could save your passwords and other details in a simple text file on your PC ?
That makes sense but if your PC is accessible to others it is not a good idea to explicitly save your personal account details in a text file available to every user on your PC.
There are many other ways to keep your account credentials safe on your computer but they are often a folder password software or something like that, but it is a waste of time and most of the times those software are malware itself.
Another option is using an encryption/decryption software on your PC but you won't be able to decrypt your details if you don't have that particular software on the other PC too. Say you downloaded the encrypted file from your Dropbox on a public PC, now to decrypt it you need to install an extra software on it, and it's not a good idea though.
Let's Start Encrypting/Decrypting
There's an inbuilt encode and decode function in JavaScript that takes in an string and output the result. The function we are talking about are btoa and atob, in JavaScript these functions are generally used for transmission of data that may cause communication problems.
But I found another use of these functions and when I found myself saving my account details on my PC accessible to anyone. I then used those function to encode the details, save it in a text file and when I needed it I used the decode function.
Open the JavaScript Console
First we need to open the Developer Tools with JS Console in the browser. If you want to learn how to open developer tools in different browser check this tutorial.
http://www.stramaxon.com/2013/10/developer-tools-in-browser.html
If you don't want to read that tutorial then just use these keyboard shortcuts to open JavaScript console on your browser :
Chrome - CTRL+SHIFT+J (CMD+SHIFT+J on Mac)
Mozilla Firefox - CTRL+SHIFT+K
Encode it first
Finally when we have the Console open, we are ready to use it for encoding any text we like. The function that encodes any text is btoa("Text you want to encode") if you run this in your Console it will output this VGV4dCB5b3Ugd2FudCB0byBlbmNvZGU= .
We now know what the function does now see how can you use it
?
1
btoa("Something here");
The text between the parentheses and double quotes is the text you are encoding so replace it with your personal details you want to encode and once you run it the console will return the encoded version of it, now you can save that text in your file and no one be able to read it (if you don't have any geek or programmer kind of people near you, can be worry free).
Here's a screenshot
Time to Decode
Encoding is of no use if you can't decode it for later use. As btoa() encodes a string similarly atob() decodes the encoded text.
Try running this code in your open JavaScript Console
atob("VGV4dCB5b3Ugd2FudCB0byBlbmNvZGU=");
This will output "Text you want to encode". You use this function in the same way but you just need to pass encoded data in the parentheses.
Tip: If you want extra protection, you can encoded the encoded data too but you also need to decode it the times you encoded it.
Bonus Tool!
Even before writing this article I had written a small JavaScript tool you can use to encode/decode data without worrying about the Console and function codes. Click the link below and start using it.
That makes sense but if your PC is accessible to others it is not a good idea to explicitly save your personal account details in a text file available to every user on your PC.
There are many other ways to keep your account credentials safe on your computer but they are often a folder password software or something like that, but it is a waste of time and most of the times those software are malware itself.
Another option is using an encryption/decryption software on your PC but you won't be able to decrypt your details if you don't have that particular software on the other PC too. Say you downloaded the encrypted file from your Dropbox on a public PC, now to decrypt it you need to install an extra software on it, and it's not a good idea though.
Let's Start Encrypting/Decrypting
There's an inbuilt encode and decode function in JavaScript that takes in an string and output the result. The function we are talking about are btoa and atob, in JavaScript these functions are generally used for transmission of data that may cause communication problems.
But I found another use of these functions and when I found myself saving my account details on my PC accessible to anyone. I then used those function to encode the details, save it in a text file and when I needed it I used the decode function.
Open the JavaScript Console
First we need to open the Developer Tools with JS Console in the browser. If you want to learn how to open developer tools in different browser check this tutorial.
http://www.stramaxon.com/2013/10/developer-tools-in-browser.html
If you don't want to read that tutorial then just use these keyboard shortcuts to open JavaScript console on your browser :
Chrome - CTRL+SHIFT+J (CMD+SHIFT+J on Mac)
Mozilla Firefox - CTRL+SHIFT+K
Encode it first
Finally when we have the Console open, we are ready to use it for encoding any text we like. The function that encodes any text is btoa("Text you want to encode") if you run this in your Console it will output this VGV4dCB5b3Ugd2FudCB0byBlbmNvZGU= .
We now know what the function does now see how can you use it
?
1
btoa("Something here");
The text between the parentheses and double quotes is the text you are encoding so replace it with your personal details you want to encode and once you run it the console will return the encoded version of it, now you can save that text in your file and no one be able to read it (if you don't have any geek or programmer kind of people near you, can be worry free).
Here's a screenshot
Time to Decode
Encoding is of no use if you can't decode it for later use. As btoa() encodes a string similarly atob() decodes the encoded text.
Try running this code in your open JavaScript Console
atob("VGV4dCB5b3Ugd2FudCB0byBlbmNvZGU=");
This will output "Text you want to encode". You use this function in the same way but you just need to pass encoded data in the parentheses.
Tip: If you want extra protection, you can encoded the encoded data too but you also need to decode it the times you encoded it.
Bonus Tool!
Even before writing this article I had written a small JavaScript tool you can use to encode/decode data without worrying about the Console and function codes. Click the link below and start using it.
