Boz is a private bookmarking service by Alex Bosworth. It is a very interesting propject that allows users to post bookmarks that even the server doesn’t know about. Boz was originally written to replace priv.at, a del.icio.us hack blocked by Yahoo. Boz is free and the underlying Javascript code is released under the GPL.

How it works is that just before you post a bookmark, your browser encrypts the data and sends the bookmark information encrypted with your private key to the server. To browse your bookmarks, the server sends them back encrypted and your browser then decrypts them.

Benjamin Ferrari points out that the service lacks a lot of features when compared to other bookmark services, especially search capabilities. Maybe our short bibliography for searching on remote encrypted data could come in handy.

Now that I’ve started playing around with encryption, I am starting to think it’s a good idea for a lot more applications.

It is good to know that others think that browser crypto is a viable solution! Clipperz is moving along the same lines to build a secure digital vault and password manager.

Alex laments the “paucity of quality open source web browser encryption and decryption libraries”. He’s definitely right and we understand how complex is getting the crypto primitives right. This is why at Clipperz we developed our own Javascript crypto library from scratch. It will be released under a BSD license and the code will be available here.