Pixelated Semantics

Reverse engineering censored documents

Cryptology and linguistics meet in "reverse engineering of a censored document". The technique to extract redacted text from a de-classified document, is described as "at first sight, nothing revolutionary". The researchers "measured the inclination of the text...then used a character recognition software to determine the width of the text which provides the number of letters per unit of length. Simple recourse to an English dictionary then helped establish a list of possible words..." The "attack" could however probably be "defeated" by the use of monotype text with fixed widths for each letter.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 10:50 am ::