Ah now careful there. Its a secret algorithm so we have no idea how crypto-secure it is. It appears to have a constant salt and not too many inputs, because his testing showed the same output with similar inputs, so I wouldn't expect much. Even a dumb cryptographer would include a random 8 bit salt so you'd require an average of 128 cycles before noticing a duplicate, so I don't think its intentional crypto, although they'd know that I/we'd know so they'd know to ... this turns into annoying paranoia.
Possibly the contact has formal written GOOG corporate cooperation. But the theoretical minimum to know the cruddy secret algo is extremely low, like someone who knows someone who used to work there, or obtained the disk image of a stolen or improperly disposed of GOOG laptop or server hard disk, or someone who was bribed or was acting as the agent of a national government while being employed without GOOGs knowledge. Shoulder surfing an employee at the coffee shop, overheard something, etc.
Thats the problem with a cruddy crypto algo. Its a cruddy crypto algo.
Now what it probably is, is some kind of verification toy to prove internally some translator / load balancer thingy didn't mess up, or something probably very innocent like that. Of course if they were actually rolling out something evil thats exactly the right way to present it. Hmm.
Ah now careful there. Its a secret algorithm so we have no idea how crypto-secure it is. It appears to have a constant salt and not too many inputs, because his testing showed the same output with similar inputs, so I wouldn't expect much. Even a dumb cryptographer would include a random 8 bit salt so you'd require an average of 128 cycles before noticing a duplicate, so I don't think its intentional crypto, although they'd know that I/we'd know so they'd know to ... this turns into annoying paranoia.
Possibly the contact has formal written GOOG corporate cooperation. But the theoretical minimum to know the cruddy secret algo is extremely low, like someone who knows someone who used to work there, or obtained the disk image of a stolen or improperly disposed of GOOG laptop or server hard disk, or someone who was bribed or was acting as the agent of a national government while being employed without GOOGs knowledge. Shoulder surfing an employee at the coffee shop, overheard something, etc.
Thats the problem with a cruddy crypto algo. Its a cruddy crypto algo.
Now what it probably is, is some kind of verification toy to prove internally some translator / load balancer thingy didn't mess up, or something probably very innocent like that. Of course if they were actually rolling out something evil thats exactly the right way to present it. Hmm.