Pictures of redacted files free#
Meanwhile, Mike Lissner, executive director of the Free Law Project, a nonprofit that helps open up court data and provided access to legal documents for the research, says the organization has developed a system that can help identify badly redacted documents. Jones adds that people should “review” data and their files before converting them to a format that is going to be shared. “Customers can save a document as a PDF, but it is the role of the redaction tool to censor or obscure information,” says Jeff Jones, senior director, Microsoft. Microsoft did not address data being leaked from Word documents that are converted to PDFs. Bland and the research paper say that many of the organizations have engaged with the team’s research. The vast majority of the organizations impacted by real-world redaction failures highlighted in the research-including the US Department of Justice, the US courts system, the Office of Inspector General, and Adobe-did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. “The picture it paints is scary too often redaction is done badly.” It “presents a comprehensive study of redaction tools and the ways in which they can be broken, including exploiting nearly invisible aspects of a document’s typography,” says Lopresti, who was not involved with the research. “I’ve been in lots of discussions with the US court system, I provided them 710 different documents that were just trivial copy-paste style redactions,” says Bland, the paper’s lead author.ĭaniel Lopresti, a professor of computer science at Lehigh University who has studied redaction techniques, says the research is impressive.
After examining millions of publicly available documents with blacked-out redactions-including from the US court system, the US Office of the Inspector General, and Freedom of Information Act requests-the researchers found thousands of documents that exposed people’s names and other sensitive details.
Plus, a new attack method they devised makes it possible to extract secret details from the redacted text. The findings, from researchers Maxwell Bland, Anushya Iyer, and Kirill Levchenko, say two of the most popular tools for redacting documents offer no protection to the underlying text at all, with the text accessible by copying and pasting it.
Pictures of redacted files pdf#
New research from a team at the University of Illinois looked at the most popular tools for redacting PDF documents and found many of them wanting. When this redaction is done incorrectly, people’s safety and national security can be put at risk. The majority of redactions-by government officials and courts-involve placing black boxes over text in PDFs. Now that most documents are digitized, securely redacting their contents has become harder. If this didn’t work, a chunky black marker pen would do the job. For years, if you wanted to protect sensitive text in a document, you could grab a pair of scissors or a scalpel and cut out the information.
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