RSS Feed Encryption

I'm providing source code to encrypt your RSS feed (or any other content created on your server) and decrypt it in your browser. This is to enable you to put sensitive data into your feed without making it public.

feedencryption.zip (4 KB)

• Web server with PHP installed
• PHP programming knowledge
• Knowledge on the format of RSS feeds (if you want to encrypt a feed)
• Greasemonkey (for decryption in Firefox)

1. Upload encryption.php to your server
2. Create your PHP script which will output your RSS feed
3. Add include(“encryption.php”) to your feed creation script
4. Encrypt any sensitive data with enrypt($text,$key) where $key is your encryption key (some string). Remember this key.

Note: This currently only works with Firefox and Google Reader. If you can support more feed readers by modifying decrypt.user.js, please send me a message.

1. Edit decrypt.user.js, set encryptionKey to your password (must be the same as the one on the server)
2. Drag decrypt.user.js into Firefox and install with Greasemonkey
3. Open Google Reader, subscribe to your feed

• I'm using XXTEA (Corrected Block Tiny Encryption Algorithm) using source code from here. The authors provide no guarantee that their implementation is correct and so don't I. Use this source code at your own risk.
• Any characters will come out in Google Reader the way you encrypted them. If you used tags, they will not go through Google Reader's filter. On one hand, you can import content into Google Reader that it would normally remove from your feed (like JavaScript, for example). On the other hand, you can easily mess up Google Reader if you're using the wrong markup.