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

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

Mxi

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.

The 11 techniques with which they steal the private data of your Xiaomi mobile
In xiaomist
The 11 techniques with which they steal the private data of your Xiaomi mobile

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.

{"videoId":"x801azu","autoplay":true,"title":"Cómo PROTEGER tu ANDROID de VIRUS y MALWARE: Trucos y consejos"}

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.

(function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName( head )[0]; if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement( script ); instagramScript.src = ; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); } })();

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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 .

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