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Anubis Works

(xeiaso.net)
313 points evacchi | 3 comments | 12 Apr 25 22:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.324s | source
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cookiengineer ◴[13 Apr 25 02:35 UTC] No.43669587[source]▶
I am currently building a prototype of what I call the "enigma webfont" where I want to implement user sessions with custom seeds / rotations for a served and cached webfont.

The goal is to make web scraping unfeasible because of computational costs for OCR. It's a cat and mouse game right now and I want to change the odds a little. The HTML source would be effectively void without the user session, meaning an OTP like behavior could also make web pages unreadable once the assets go uncached.

This would allow to effectively create a captcha that would modify the local seed window until the user can read a specified word. "Move the slider until you can read the word Foxtrott", for example.

I sure would love to hear your input, Xe. Maybe we can combine our efforts?

My tech stack is go, though, because it was the only language where I could easily change the webfont files directly without issues.

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lifthrasiir ◴[13 Apr 25 02:55 UTC] No.43669695[source]▶
Besides from the obvious accessibility issue, wouldn't that be a substitution cipher at best? Enough corpus should render its cryptanalysis much easier.
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1. creata ◴[13 Apr 25 03:04 UTC] No.43669731[source]▶
There's probably something horrific you can do with TrueType to make it more complex than a substitution cipher.
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2. lifthrasiir ◴[13 Apr 25 03:11 UTC] No.43669771[source]▶
GSUB rules are inherently local, so for example the same cryptanalysis approach should work for space-separated words instead of letters. A polyalphabetic cipher would work better but that means you can't ever share the same internal glyph for visually same but differently encoded letters.
3. cookiengineer ◴[13 Apr 25 06:46 UTC] No.43670630[source]▶
The hint I want to give you is: unicode and ligatures :) they're awesome in the worst sense. Words can be ligatures, too, btw.