Blurred Out Text Can Be Recovered

Today’s post is more or less just an example that just about anything, image protection in this case, can be ‘hacked’. In this post titled “Recovering Censored Text Using Photoshop and JavaScript“, the author has a script which recovers blurred text from an image.

Quoting the article:

Applying a filter like Photoshop’s “mosaic” filter obscures the original data, but doesn’t remove it entirely. If we can reconstruct an image with known text that looks very similar to original image, then we can be pretty sure the original text is the same as our known text. This is very similar in principle to brute-force cracking a password hash.

The script source is posted as well as a flash video showing the script in action. The author is clear upfront that the script isn’t foolproof and at this time only works in “ideal” conditions, but it goes to show, with a bit of tinkering the script could probably work in any condition.

Again, this tip is more of a “this is cool” kind of post, but proves what you think may be safe online really isn’t.