It takes some work, but there are ways to uncover that sensitive text.
Check out our evil week tag page.
Undoubtedly you have all seen photographs of people on TV and online who have been blurred to hide faces.
For example, here’s one of Bill Gates.
So that’s good, if that’s what you intended.
However, many people also resort to blurring sensitivenumbersandtext.
I’ll illustrate why that is a bad idea.
Then, use your own high resolution photo to Photoshop out your numbers.
Above, a(0000001)_1 = 213.
“But you used your own crafted easy-to-decipher image!”
In the real world we have photos, not fictitious checks made in Photoshop.
We have distortions of the text because of the camera angle, imperfect alignment, and so on.
Either way, the lowest few distances determined can be considered as candidates.
So yes, I used an image against itself and designed it to work here.
But the algorithm can surely be improved to work on real world photos.
This is just a proof of concept.
Think about creating a 100x100 graphic on the screen.
turn it into a single pixel “mosaic”).
This is reasonably secure since nobody will ever be able to decrypt the password from looking at its ciphertext.
If the two match, the user has successfully authenticated.
As such, users are commonly advised to pick more complex passwords that are not words.
You are converting the image you have into another image designed to be unreadable.
At that point, one can simply compare the blurred pixels to see whatmostclosely matches the original blurred photo.
The solution is simple: don’t blur your images!
Bill Gates photo via Wikicommons.
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