Secure RSS Syndication
By Joe Gregorio

I have a problem. It's actually a pretty common problem. I have data that I
want to syndicate to myself, but I don't want you to see it. It's private.
Now this could be my credit card balance or internal bug reports for the day
job. Either way, I want the information in a form suitable for syndication
but not available to everyone.
A Solution

There is a solution. I could password-protect my feed. But that causes a
problem, because my aggregator would then need to know my password. Now my
aggregator of choice is Bloglines, and I'm sure they're nice folks, but I
really don't want to give them my password. One security breach and my
whopping credit card debt is splattered across the Web. Just for the record,
for the rest of the discussion I will use Bloglines, but in fact one of my
design goals is that this technique should work equally well with all
web-based aggregators.

One other possible solution comes from Atom. Atom provides support for XML
Encryption Syntax & Processing. This isn't really usable, for several
reasons:

   1. Atom isn't finished.
   2. Bloglines doesn't support XML Encryption.
   3. I want my encrypted data now!

A Different Solution

A better solution would not require me to give Bloglines my password, or
some other key with which to decrypt my content. But if Bloglines isn't
going to decrypt my content, who will?

How about my browser?

If I can somehow get my browser to decrypt the content of the feed, then I
can continue to use Bloglines to poll the feed and present me with new items
as they appear, but the decryption is done in my browser.

< snip >

 http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/07/13/secure-rss.html



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