How to Contribute

There are two main ways that you can contribute to the CrypTool 2 project. Your first option is to just get in touch with us to give us some feedback or advice, or to offer anything else that you would like to add to the project. The other option is to contact us to set up a long-term working relationship. Both options are greatly appreciated by us; the latter might bring you on the team list after some time.

If you want to develop a plug-in for CrypTool, you can simply download our source code and start programming. There are no restrictions other than you cannot upload your results to our code repository. If you think that it is good fun and you would like to contribute your code, just get in touch with us so that we can give you write access to our versioning system.

For anything else, please just drop us a message and we can start discussing. When you get in touch with us, it would be great if you could also tell us something about yourself – where you are from, how you heard about CrypTool, how you use it, and of course what your reason is for contacting us... ;-)

Further documentation and links can be found here.

Whom We Need

Generally speaking, we need anyone who is willing to contribute to a purely non-profit project with no other reward than fantastic feedback from users and a very friendly and professional community of contributors, both from around the globe. To be a bit more concrete, we first of all need experienced software developers who are willing to develop with the Microsoft .NET framework and its rather new features – CrypTool 2 is developed purely in C# and WPF.

We require support in various other aspects of the CrypTool 2 project:

  • If you are not experienced in cryptography at all, but particularly experienced in software development, we would love to get you on board. Please do not hesitate to contact us. It is at least as important to understand the .NET framework and our source code as it is to understand the overall topic. In particular, our core development has little to nothing to do with cryptography whatsoever. We also require people who are good at coding WPF.

  • If you are a (semi)-professional cryptographer and interested not only in research but also in teaching this exciting topic, we need you to help us in establishing ideas for additional features. Also we are very appreciative for feedback about the current version of CrypTool 2.

  • If you are new to cryptography and use CrypTool 2 for your studies, please do not hesitate to send us your feedback. Even if you just find obvious errors in our implementations, think that the documentation is too intangible, or just identify some funny effects which do not seem to be intended: please send us your feedback.

  • If cryptography is not your sole interest and you also like doing graphical design, we need your support. We are grateful for people who are able to adapt to our current design model and want to contribute accordingly. If you also think that polishing some of the current icons would not hurt, please feel free to do so. We are more than happy to check out your results and potentially incorporate them in our next release.