Crank / News: Recent posts

The new version features a guile interface, which should form the basis of groups of componant settings ("patches"), and user preferences.

At long last, the new development version of Crank is here. It sucks somewhat, being hugely difficult to use and somewhat lacking in features ;-) But hopefully this can be rectified shortly...

I haven't got Windows on my home machine, and I haven't managed to trek over to my university to do the Crank 0.1.4 build. If anyone wants this, just send me an email and I'll get it done,

This version adds a toolbar, a proper make install target, and speedups. It will probably be the last 0.1.* release (apart from maybe bugfixes), since version 0.2.0 has been in the works for a little while. I'm not satisfied with the current plugin architecture, so 0.2.0 will feature a much more general componant system, where various cipher transforms, algorithms and fitness functions can be mixed and matched at will.

Two new plugins for this version: a grid route cipher tool, and a hidden cipher breaker.

Finally got the new plugins compiled under Windows. Need to run your display in better than 256 colours to work. Recommend downloading crank-win-0.1.3pre.zip if you haven't already got the GTK+ DLLs, and the crank-win-no-gtk-0.1.3pre.zip if you have.

Incomplete new plugins - steganalysis.word-gaps for revealing hidden messages, and transposition.grid-controls for columnar transposition ciphers.

New source text pane (as well as the old view pane) added, which makes things more obvious. It's editable, and updates the other pane automatically.

Now does as much as 0.0.5, but using plugins. User interface needs a fair bit of work, though.

It may be a couple more versions before the Windows binaries get brought up to date, not least because my Windows partition fails to boot...

Crank now has a (somewhat) working plugin architecture! So far, most of the functionality of v0.0.5 has been split into three plugins, each corresponding to a seperate cryptanalysis 'tool'. Preprocessing, setting the source from the view and user interface niceness are now missing, but are planned to be reenabled soon.

Once the plugin system is polished off, it should be much easier to add new features to Crank, a fair few of which are in the pipeline...

Added source editor, put things in menus instead of ugly buttons.

Released with added stats features, such as sorting the frequency tables, index of coincidence, and some entropy stuff. Oh, and a Windows makefile.

I've split the windows binary package into two; one being the compiled program ('crank-win'), and the other containing the DLLs required to run Gtk+ programs on Windows ('crank-dll'). That way, if a new version of Crank is released, only the relatively small crank-win package needs to be downloaded.

In short, you need both to run Crank on windows.

A set of windows binaries, together with the DLL files, are now available as a package. Unzip them into a directory and run crank from there.

Two releases in one day? Well, the autocracker is now improved quite a bit.

Bit of a source reorganise to split gui and program logic - it was rather messy in 0.0.1

v0.0.1 has been released, and includes monoalphabetic keys, basic stats and preprocessing, and an automatic cracker.

Not particularly surpisingly, there's not been much work done since having gotten 'underway'. But heck, exams are over now, so maybe v0.01 will be released soon...

Crank has got most of what I want included for an initial version, except for an automatic decryption algorithm. When I get that in, I'll release v0.01.