AES Encrypt & Decrypt

How to Use the Free Client-Side AES Encrypt & Decrypt

This tool applies AES-256-GCM, the same authenticated encryption standard used across modern infrastructure, to text you type, deriving the key from a password rather than a pre-shared key file. Everything runs locally through the Web Crypto API.

1. Paste the plaintext you want to protect, or the ciphertext you want to recover.
2. Enter a strong password, which is converted to a 256-bit key with PBKDF2 and a random salt over 600,000 iterations.
3. Click Encrypt to secure your text, or Decrypt with the correct password to recover the original.

When to Use AES Encrypt & Decrypt

Anyone who has to move secrets across untrusted territory has a use for this tool. You can encrypt sensitive configuration values and environment variables before storing them in a file or handing them to a teammate, protect confidential text before sending it over channels you do not fully trust, and wrap backup data or API credentials in password-based encryption so that a lost file does not mean a lost secret.

Because AES-256-GCM is a public standard, your output is portable. Any compliant tool that knows the password can decrypt what you produce here, which makes the tool useful for exchanging encrypted values between environments and teams without locking anyone into a proprietary format.

AES Encrypt & Decrypt Tips and Best Practices

1. The encryption is only as strong as your password. Use a long, random passphrase, and let the tool's PBKDF2 stretching do the heavy lifting against offline guessing.
2. Keep the initialization vector alongside the ciphertext. The IV is required for decryption, but it does not need to be secret, so store them together rather than losing one.
3. There is no password recovery. AES-256-GCM needs the exact same password used for encryption, so store it in a password manager you actually trust.
4. Share the password through a different channel than the encrypted data. Handing someone both through the same route defeats the point of encrypting.

Why Client-Side Privacy Matters for encrypting and decrypting text with a password-derived key

Encryption tools sit at the most sensitive end of the spectrum, because they are used precisely when data matters too much to expose. If that tool is server-based, the plaintext you are trying to protect crosses the network, and the password that unlocks it crosses with it, turning the exercise into theater.

Here, the Web Crypto API does all the work in your browser. Plaintext, ciphertext, salt, and password never leave your device, so the secrecy of your data depends on your own password hygiene rather than on a third-party server keeping its logs clean.