CryptoText is a COM encryption component written in ATL3.0 for Windows 9x, NT4.0 and Windows 2000/XP. It provides simple access to the CryptoAPI in Windows from Visual Basic, Visual C++ and scripting languages (eg ASP).

As well as being a standalone product CryptoText can be used with CryptoTextCE for the PocketPC / Windows CE platform to exchange encrypted data with handheld devices.

CryptoText encrypts the input text data, and converts the resulting binary encrypted form to a series of ASCII characters which are suitable for use in a SQL statement, or for storage in a text/.ini file. For example the text ''My Password'' might become the text string ''79978e13df1019826c16944fe1''. This type of conversion is necessary because certain characters are reserved and have special meanings in an SQL statement, and by default the Windows CryptoAPI functions will take binary input data (your text) and map each of the characters to a binary number in the range 0 - 255. The simplest solution, although somewhat wasteful of space, is to convert the binary number into a string representation of the equivalent hex number, guaranteeing that only the characters 0-9 and a-f will be present.