(C) BoingBoing
Author Name: BoingBoing
This story was originally published on Boingboing.net. [1]
License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.[2]


Never use pixelation to redact text

2022-02-16 00:00:00

Blurring and swirling are ineffective methods for obscuring media—they once caught a sexual abuser of children by "unswirling' his face—and unredacting pixelated text is now an all-but-solved problem.

So there's an existing tool called Depix that tries to do exactly this through a really clever process of looking up what permutations of pixels could have resulted in certain pixelated blocks, given a De Bruijn sequence of the correct font. I like the theory of this tool a lot, but a researcher at Jumpsec pointed out that perhaps it doesn't work as well in practice as you'd like. In real-world examples you're likely to get minor variations and noise that throws a wrench into the gears. They then issued a challenge to anyone, offering a prize if you could un-redact the following image. How could I refuse such a challenge?!

You must completely obliterate or replace the text. Keeping some quantum of the visual character of the secret text inherently █████ your ability to redact it.

Tip! Go back to published documents and media that were thusly redacted years ago, and make fresh news of them.
[END]

[1] URL: https://boingboing.net/2022/02/16/never-use-pixelation-to-redact-text.html
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

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