Cryptoogle

Cryptoogle is not the world's first search engine for dead people; it's not even a Google project. Instead, it's a rather fun idea for encryption. The idea is that you encrypt information with a password that's a valid Google search term. A Blowfish key is generated from the search results, and is used to encrypt the plaintext.

So why do this? I'm not sure, really. The author argues that, because Google's search results change, the key will automatically expire at some point in the future. He also claims that this prevents dictionary attacks because an adversary is limited with the number of Google queries which can be made.

Well, there are much better ways of doing this sort of thing, of course, and deriving your secret key from information pulled over the insecure Internet is certainly not a workable strategy, but I thought it was a fun idea anyway.

Tags: Cryptography , Encryption