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Why Blurring Sensitive Information is a Bad Choice for Hiding It
jgpaiva:
I see.
Another question: doesn't the method mentioned in the article only work if all bluring methods use the same algorithm? (which they don't, or do they?)
f0dder:
Well, you can often guess which tool a person used (photoshop, gimp, paint shop pro). And most effects are probably implemented similarly anyway.
mouser:
As f0dder says, blurring is a *lossy* algorithm, which means that information gets lost when you blur something, so it's not going to be possible to recover the original exactly or completely in most cases.
The real lesson from this article is that you should be really careful about "slightly blurring images which could have come from a small set of possible sources (like a number)". If you sufficiently blur something with some real variety it's going to be difficult to recover it.
Still - it does suggest that there is room in the world for a "cryptographically secure" blurring algorithm, which purposely introduces some randomness and color reduction in order to eliminate the possibility of recovery.
TucknDar:
Damn, I bet that Screenshot Captor author speculates in getting all our personal information!! :o
f0dder:
Damn, I bet that Screenshot Captor author speculates in getting all our personal information!! :o
-TucknDar (January 08, 2007, 01:00 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah... do take a look at the alpha channels of those .png pictures! :o
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