Encrypt Files: The Best Encryption Software and Encryption Method Compared

You may have come across warnings about a piece of malware called 'RotorCrypt', first identified around 2016–2018.

This malware encrypts a victim's files without permission and demands payment to restore access — a criminal extortion scheme with no connection to this software.

RotorCrypt X-Files works the opposite way: it only encrypts files, folders, or messages that you yourself explicitly choose. It never encrypts anything automatically, never demands payment, and never locks you out of your own data.

If you were directed here while researching the ransomware, you are safe — RotorCrypt X-Files is unrelated, legitimate software made solely to protect your own files.

Data Security and Backup

One aspect is often overlooked: data security is more than just encryption. A backup and recovery concept is essential – encrypted data without a backup copy is just as lost as unencrypted data if a hard drive fails. That is why: encryption protects against unauthorized access, a backup protects against data loss. Data security and security data mean different things here: data security describes the state of protection, security data are the technical logs behind it. Real security also includes data recovery – the backup plan in case something goes wrong despite every precaution.

Anyone who regularly creates a Windows backup or maintains an external data backup rarely thinks about encryption at the same time. A PC backup without encryption protects against data loss, not against outside access – an encrypted backup protects against both. VeraCrypt containers can easily be added to any Windows backup app before being stored in a second location. Whether you call it backup, backups, or simply saving – what matters is that it runs regularly, not just once a year.

What Is Cryptography?

A cipher is essentially nothing more than a calculation rule that turns plaintext into ciphertext. What is cryptography? The science that develops exactly such methods and tests them for weaknesses. A method is considered cryptographically secure if it withstands these tests for years.

With quantum cryptography and post-quantum cryptography, the next generations are already emerging – methods meant to withstand even a quantum computer. RotorCrypt X-Files builds on exactly this. Cryptology as the overarching discipline and quantum cryptography security are no longer niche academic topics.

What Is a Quantum Computer?

Anyone searching for a quantum computer sometimes lands on encryption pages like this one – not by accident, since both topics are connected. Quantum computing explained in one sentence: instead of classical bits, quantum computers calculate with qubits, which can hold several states at once. Providers such as IQM already build IQM quantum computers for research today.

What is a quantum computer? Put simply, a machine that could potentially solve certain mathematical problems – including classical encryption methods – in minutes instead of millennia. That is exactly why the question of how quantum computing works also concerns anyone choosing encryption software today.

Similar but Unrelated Search Terms

Anyone who searched for an SDM login, a security data login, a skew value, the meaning of skewing, or the abbreviation SDE: these terms come from statistics, database technology, or enterprise software and have nothing to do with file encryption.

Encryption Methods at a Glance

The Caesar cipher is considered the oldest known cipher – developed around 58 BC by Julius Caesar for military messages. Each letter is shifted a fixed number of places in the alphabet. Advantage: simple enough to use by hand. Disadvantage: only 25 possible keys, crackable in seconds today.

The Vigenère cipher followed in 1553, described by Giovan Battista Bellaso. It uses a keyword instead of a fixed shift. Advantage: considerably more resistant than Caesar. Disadvantage: solvable with statistical methods once the key length is known.

The Enigma – patented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius – encrypted electromechanically using rotating rotors and was used by the German Wehrmacht in World War II. Advantage: enormous key variety for its time. Disadvantage: decrypted nonetheless by the Allies, including Alan Turing.

DES (Data Encryption Standard) was created in 1977 at IBM, reviewed by the NSA before becoming the US standard. Advantage: the first widely used digital encryption standard. Disadvantage: only a 56-bit key length – long since breakable by brute force and outdated.

RSA, named after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, also followed in 1977 and was one of the first practical public-key methods. Advantage: no prior key exchange needed. Disadvantage: computationally heavy, so usually used only for key exchange rather than encrypting whole messages.

AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), developed in 1998 by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen and confirmed by NIST in 2001, is still considered practically unbreakable today. Advantage: fast, well researched, broadly supported. Disadvantage: symmetric – sender and recipient need the same key. VeraCrypt and RotorCrypt X-Files rely on exactly this method.