Blurring Images Not So Secure 166
An anonymous reader writes "Dheera Venkatraman explains in a webpage how an attacker might be able to extract personal information such as check or credit card numbers, from images blurred with a mosaic effect, potentially exposing the data behind hundreds of images of blurred checks found online, and provides a ficticious example.
While much needs to be developed to apply such an algorithm to real photographic images, he offers a simple, yet obvious solution: cover up the sensitive information, don't blur it."
Re:and please... (Score:3, Interesting)
And cover it correctly... (Score:4, Interesting)
People who do not understand the technology they are working with should not have this kind of release authority. And that's the hard part--the higher up you are in the food chain, the less likely you are to understand the new tools your organization is working with.
There are very few users in government who could not do their jobs just fine using Windows 3.11, WordStar 3.x and an e-mail client on a fast but simple machine.
Slaved as the government is to Microsoft's development cycle, however, the government will always be at the cutting edge of compromised.
Un-blurring photos (Score:2, Interesting)
While I acknowledge knowning little about different blurring algorithms could someone enlight a bit how much of "unblurring" can be done? I realize there are some "sharpen" filters in Photoshop and Gimp but AFAIK they all seem to be based on highlighting edges or something like that.
As in the TFA, the Bill Gates picture has a small part of it blurred (his face). Could it be possible to calcute all the possible variations that give the same bitmap as the original when filtered with gaussian blur? What I glanced from gaussian blur page [wikipedia.org] the group including all the possible solutions has to be finite, I guess, while being very huge..
This combined with a monkey (or bored computer user) could "help" refine the patter by selecting the most likely variation until the user is satisfied. Or is this something for which there already exists programs?
Re:Blurring CAN be secure (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:old news - I see this on TV every day. (Score:4, Interesting)
You need to realize that CSI is science fiction masquerading as a cop show. Their impossible tricks with image processsing and the like are the show's equivalent of FTL travel. But despite having miraculous technology, they actually get the method and attidudes of science right, at least on the original series. They look at the evidence, and struggle to overcome their prejudices regarding what they would like to be true. Sometimes they follow false trails, and have to accomodate new facts by discarding the theory they've built up so far.
Gil Grissom may be the only character in TV history who actually behaves more-or-less like a real scientist.
Re:Japanese porn (Score:3, Interesting)
I always thought porn was for hiding Soviet spy messages. I suppose pictures could hide horse porn with steganography.