{Disarmed} Pixelating personal data is useless: this way they can be depixelated and compromise your security

Xiaomi has in its photo editor a very useful function (in appearance), a ' Mosaic Mode ' that we usually use to encrypt compromised data when we make a tutorial . Well, we have bad news: it doesn't help much.

We thought so, that pixelating our ID or our COVID passport guaranteed invulnerable encryption, since the resulting image could not be reconstructed. A false sense of security that has just been collapsed: it is possible to reverse the process and be able to see what had previously been crossed out , pixelated or blurred. How? This is how they have achieved it.

Mosaic Mode is not as foolproof as it seems

As our colleagues from Xataka report, a few years ago a reward was offered to viewers of a documentary on channel France 2. Access to the virtual wallet was encrypted using a QR code . The price was nothing more and nothing less than 1,000 dollars.

Two industrial developers, through a reverse engineering process that took them 16 hours, managed to refocus the code and access the money in this wallet. A somewhat crude way, as if we were trying to recombine all the pieces of a puzzle to see which one fits best, which uncovered a problem: the so-called avalanche effect is ideal for depixelizing or refocusing an encrypted image.

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The security consultancy BishopFox has verified how this technique can be taken to its ultimate consequences: using a tool called Unredacter , you can reinvert the effects of any pixelated text and even depixelate videos using AI.

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So what is the solution? Delete it or cross it out with large black bars and confirm this image as a new . By recomposing nearby pixels, methods that only blur don't do much good.

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The news Pixelar personal data is useless: this way they can be depixelated and compromise your security was originally published in xiaomist by Isra Fdez .