The new program is able to recover information hidden by pixelation.

Many businesses exchange documents that are pixelated to protect personal information: these can be bank account numbers, photos, or any other personal information. Although the pixelation used for this purpose should be a simple and effective way of hiding confidential information, but now computers have become “smart enough” to “read” such distorted images, even if your eye cannot do this . Pixelized documents are no longer secure!

Researchers at the University of Texas and Cornell Tech have developed an artificial intelligence program that can read standard content masking techniques (such as blurring or pixelation) to read what is hidden behind them.
')
One of the authors, Vitaly Shmatikov, warned that in addition to complex technical developments, “the techniques we used in this document are quite standard in the field of image recognition, which is a matter of concern.”

But these researchers are not the only ones who are developing this type of software. For those who want to take advantage of such solutions, more powerful object and face recognition techniques are already available. This means that cyber criminals may already have the tools to disclose personal information that you have hidden.



To conduct their research, they used images with faces, words and objects in neural networks . The more times the neural networks “saw” these images, the easier it was for them to recognize them. After successfully memorizing photos, neural networks were able to successfully overcome three privacy protection technologies, including YouTube's blur technology, pixelation, and Privacy Preserving Photo Sharing (P3).

It turns out that pixelation or information blurring is no longer the best way to hide confidential information when exchanging documents. According to the study, the software was able to recognize 80% of distorted images.

According to Lawrence Saul, a machine learning researcher at the University of California (San Diego, USA), “to overcome confidentiality, you don’t actually need to show that you are able to restore the original image in 99.9% of cases. If in 40 or 50 percent of cases you can guess a person or define a hidden text, then this is enough to understand that this method of hiding information should be outdated. ”

To ensure the security of your corporate information, the best thing you can do is to prevent the exchange of these documents (if it is possible or you can do it).