W-Shadow.com

This is more of a proof-of-concept that I created, but still pretty neat – it’s a text editor that stores the text in it’s own exe-file, compresses that text and optionally encrypts it. And it’s just 93 KB in size and doesn’t require installation!

Useful for… storing passwords, maybe 🙂 Source code is available, so it can be adapted to store other types of data, etc.

Download

wsCryptoPad.exe (93 Kb)
Required : Any Windows version

Source code (27 KB)
Required : Delphi 6 (I think), KOL/MCK, kol_Twofish, kolmd5, kolZlib (all available from http://kolmck.net/), wsCrc32

Technical notes

You can’t really write anything to the executable file of a running program (unless you write a disk driver…), so wsCryptoPad doesn’t do exactly that – but the result is the same as if did. What I really do here is create a temporary file in the temporary directory specified by OS settings. This file contains all the executable code of the program, but not the data stored in the exe-file. Then this temporary file is executed and it displays the editor and handles all the user interaction, storing the text in the original file. When editor is closed, it runs the original file, telling it to delete the temporary file. So in the end the original file contains the modified text and the temporary file is gone.

I used KOL/MCK to make this application really tiny (for a Delphi program that is still designed visually). KOL (Key Objects Library) is an excellent freeware library, that allows you to Delphi applications with extremely small exe-files. In conjunction with MCK it allows you to still design forms visually – placing components, etc. KOL, MCK and lots of related units and utilities are available at http://kolmck.net/ (the site is originally in Russian and translation is not very good at some places, but you should be okay).