Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Google's Search Encryption: Can Digital Forensics Still Retrieve Search Terms?
April 3, 2014
I applaud Google's roll-out of encrypted searching. If you somehow missed that news, Forbes has a story about it. I like foiling the Chinese hackers and the NSA snoopers.
But of course I worried a bit about whether there would be any impact on digital forensics, since our clients are so often interested in what people were searching for, whether it is how to murder someone undetected or where to download instructions for making bombs. The report I got back from our technologists (thanks Chris Fava and Phil DePue) does not make for jazzy reading, but here's the bottom line:
We were able to verify that Google's encryption does not affect our ability to recover search terms from a local machine. While we didn't believe it would, confirmation was sweet. Cue the happy dance music, "Everybody Dance Now!" and if you haven't seen the movie "Evan Almighty," you need to cue that up too.
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