Obfuscating your email on the web

I really like having my email address publicly available on my website. Email is a great medium for feedback or discussions about the articles I post here, and making it accessible increases the chance readers will think to reach out with it. The problem is, I don’t like getting email from robots, and that is an inevitable consequence of this publicity.

The solution to this is to not include my email address in the plaintext of the page, but to instead dynamically provide it to the user when they ask for it. Cloudflare has a tool for this called Scrape Shield, which hides sensitive info in the HTML of the page and injects it back in after it’s loaded in the visitor’s browser using javascript. This prevents basic bots from scraping one’s website for contact information. The problem with this solution is that their scheme is easily broken, and it’s widespread use makes breaking it valuable. I’ll show you.

If I am still using Cloudflare as you are reading this, you can cURL this page and you’ll find an obfuscated address below:

[email protected]

In a browser, you wouldn’t notice that this doesn’t say

[email protected] but the returned HTML should

instead include the following encoded email and a script to decode it.

<a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="cfa2b6a1aea2aa8faab7aea2bfa3aae1aca0a2">[email&#160;protected]</a>
<script data-cfasync="false" src="/cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script>

The script is minified, but it doesn’t take much work to decipher what it does.

  1. Find all links with class __cf_email__ and grab their data-cfemail attribute.
  2. Take the first hex byte from that string (e.g. cf) and save as a key.
  3. Iterate through the remaining hex bytes and XOR against the key.
  4. Replace the link element with the result of this operation. If the original use was in a link already, it performs some extra work to replace the href attribute and include a mailto: prefix.

This means the values of emails can be extracted with a minor amount of work after being scraped. Everything needed to decode the email is right there once a spammer knows what to look for. To further illustrate this, I wrote a decode script in Ruby:

def decode_cf(orig)
    # Split out the first byte to act as key
    key, val = orig[0..1].hex, orig[2..].hex

    # Collect bytes from the end of val XORd with key
    bytes = []
    while val > 0 do
        bytes.push((val & 255) ^ key)
        val >>= 8

    # Reverse the bytes and turn into a string

# => "[email protected]"

In this case, the use of 0xCF as a key was just a coincidence.

As far as I know, this scraping hasn’t been done at any mass scale, but the fact that it could makes me unhappy.

Another approach to take would be to remove the email information from the HTML altogether and place it into the site’s javascript bundle. While looking into this, I saw this option used in a lot of websites. Buried somewhere deep in an obfuscated and uglified javascript bundle, a click event listener sets the window location to "mailto:[email protected]". This option is nice because it requires scrapers to not only download your webpage, but also your 10 megabyte js bundle (I believe that’s called security through inconvenience). In all seriousness, this also leaves your plaintext email free to be plucked up by anyone with malicious intent who thinks to download your js.

Similarly, a few years ago I used to include my email, but reversed, and do the same thing by re-reversing it to get the correct result. I just kept imagining it still getting scraped up because even in reverse it still looks like an email. At some point in the future, it could then get corrected by a human working on the project. It worked alright, but my paranoia couldn’t let it be.

I’m writing this article today because I finally decided on and implemented a solution I’m happy with for providing my email address to as few non-humans as possible. It was inspired by this post on Zibri’s blog about TP-LINK router configuration.

At least for a certain generation of TP-LINK routers, there was a feature to export and reimport your configuration. TP-LINK intended for this to be for backup only, rather than allowing users to upload arbitrary config files, as evidenced by the fact that the file format is encrypted. Fortunately for skiddies like myself, real hackers like Zibri exist to reverse-engineer the encryption. Zibri figured out that TP-LINK used DES encryption in ECB mode with a fixed key. As this is just a cool hack and not really worth any money, they put up this post with a tool to perform the decryption and re-encryption so that anyone could modify their config as desired. However, they didn’t just put everything up publicly. To protect their work and street cred, they deployed some obfuscations.

The most important obfuscation is that they didn’t include the encryption key. Instead, they included the key XORd with the domain of their website. This meant that running on their domain was integral to the decryption process and that no one else could copy their code to another site and have it work. It became impossible to copy without understanding this and deriving the real key.

In a way, I want to do the same thing with my email address. I want a link to my address which only works when being executed by a browser live on my site and not in some context where it’s been scraped and investigated later. I can accomplish this by only publishing my address XORd with the domain of my site. Here is the javascript I wrote to accomplish this:

// Get a list of character codes as bytes from a string
const bytes = (str) => {
  return str.split('').map((c) => c.charCodeAt(0));

// Convert a list of bytes into a string
const str = (bytes) => {
  return bytes.map((b) => String.fromCharCode(b)).join('');

// Perform an XOR of two byte lists (length limited by b1)
const byte_xor = (b1, b2) => {
  return b1.map((b, i) => { b ^ b2[i] });

// The bytes required to produce my email address
const ebytes = [25,  9, 17, 10, 20, 37, 93, 1,
                29, 22, 30, 23, 75, 31, 10];

// If there is an email link on this page
let emailLink = document.getElementById('email');
if (emailLink) {

  // When a user clicks it
  emailLink.addEventListener('click', (e) => {

    // Get the hostname and repeat as needed for length
    let host = location.hostname;
    while (host.length < ebytes.length) { host = host + host; }

    // XOR the host with ebytes
    let email = str(byte_xor(ebytes, bytes(host)))

    // And send an email to the result
    window.location = "mailto:" + email;

The ebytes value for your own email address can be generated by running the following in the developer console on your website.

byte_xor(bytes("[email protected]"), bytes(location.hostname))

This solution prevents the possibility of my email being scraped in plaintext, but in reality, a scraper could still just visit my site with selenium or some other javascript-enabled headless browser, find the link with the word “email” and click it to get the address. To really get the kind of protection from robots I want, I’d need to implement recaptcha or something like that, but that’s just too much. At that point, it becomes too large a burden on real readers and works against my cause of getting people to reach out. This option reaches just the right balance of security and convenience for me.

Also it’s some neat crypto and I’m a geek for that kind of stuff.