It affects the following Google smartphones (highlighted are models that are no longer supported and will probably not get updates): But that doesn’t mean the problem can be ignored - this vulnerability is nothing if not very unpleasant. So the researchers’ demonstration should be taken as an ideal case: in real life, the success of the tool will almost certainly be lower, and the result will largely depend on the circumstances.
And the fully unrestored or badly-restored area - the top third of the resulting picture - just so happens to contain nothing important. After the edited version is saved on top of the original, there’s a lot of non-overwritten data at the end of the file that can be recovered. Thus, importantly, the resulting image is significantly smaller than the original.
Note, though, that the screenshot used as the example here is both redacted AND cropped. Recovery of an image edited with Google Pixel Markup. Here’s how the researchers themselves illustrate what’s going on: And with the help of a tool created by the researchers ( available online), it’s possible to partially restore the original. But the file saved after editing in Markup has the same size as the original: the app simply overwrites the new data on top of the old, leaving a “tail” of the initial image data in the file. The same thing happens if you paint over part of an image with a single color - thanks to the compression algorithms that are very good at packing solid-colored areas. If you crop a picture, its size in bytes compared to the original decreases, of course. When processing PNG images, instead of saving a completely new PNG file, Markup overwrites the old one in a very peculiar way. It all started when security researchers Simon Aarons and David Buchanan discovered a vulnerability they named Acropalypse: it turns out that Markup, the Google Pixel built-in image editor, saves edited PNG files in a way that lets them be fully or partially recovered. How to recover hidden information in screenshots edited on Google Pixel Let’s take a closer look at how two standard image-editing tools - one on Google Pixel and the other in Windows 11 - can reveal supposedly hidden information in images. But a recent study shows that you can still come a cropper, so to speak, even if you take just about every conceivable precaution - and all due to a bug related to image processing. We’ve already posted about how not to hide information in images and how not to retouch pictures embedded in documents. Or even better: just crop the bit of the photo or screenshot that contains your personal data. Just blot out your secrets with a big black marker in any image editor. You might think that hiding sensitive information in a picture is a cakewalk.
0 kommentar(er)
