www.BPODigest.com i-Vortal

Google Desktop Proxy

Project Computing - Google Desktop Proxy

Background and motivation

The Google Desktop allows you to search the contents of your hard drive, email and browser history contents.

The search interface runs in your browser. The Google Desktop software provides a web server which binds to your PC's TCP/IP loopback interface and can only be accessed by requests originating from your PC.

Hence, other machines can't send search requests to your Google Desktop search engine.

This is generally a good thing from a privacy point of view: do you really want random people looking at not just the contents of files on your PC but at emails and at web pages you've retrieved and even deleted from your browser cache?

Well, maybe. Maybe you like to share everything. If so, read on.

If Google Desktop were accessible from places other than the machine on which it was installed, some interesting possibilities would arise:

• Install it on a web site and use it to index/search/cache copies of the static pages (and unless you are very careful, the web server logs, configuration settings, scripts with embedded passwords...)
• Install it on a workgroup file server and use it to index/search/cache copies the contents (including secret memos, tedious MSPowerpoint presentations, suprising job applications and resumes, commercial-in-confidence tender information...)
• Install it on your PC's at work and home and your laptop and search/retrieve on any from the others (along with anyone else who uses/steals/spoofs the right IP addresses)
• Use it as the basis for a distributed, maybe a P2P search service

The Java program described here allows others to search your Google Desktop.

It contains some very simple restrictions which may allow you to make it harder for some people to search and retrieve content from your PC:

1. Requests to configure Google Desktop preferences or delete content from the Google Desktop index are blocked unless they originate from the local machine
2. By default (as installed) access is only granted to the local machine. However, a parameter file can be supplied which defines which IP addresses or IP address prefixes are allowed access. Be aware, however, that it is optimistic in the extreme to have confidence in associating IP addresses with people or organisations, and that for example, a compromised machine within a trusted IP range can easily broaden access to "the world".
3. A log file can be specified in the parameter file (but be aware that if the parameter file is stored on the PC, it too will be indexed and retrievable via the proxy, as will the proxy parameter file...). The log records date/time, remote IP address and the start of the request so you can see which horses have bolted in vaguely which direction.

How it works

This program is a very simple proxy. A browser or other program on another computer can open a connection to this program which passes the request through to the Google Desktop web server on the same machine as the proxy. Because it is on the same machine, the Google Desktop web server processes the request and passes the result back to the proxy which in turn sends it back to the originating requestor.