Comment by jmward01

Comment by jmward01 13 hours ago

Hmmm.. The more I think about this the more any font kerning is likely a major leak for redaction. Even if the boxes have randomness applied to them, the words around a blacked out area have exact positioning that constrains the text within so that only certain letter/space combinations could fit between them. With a little knowledge of the rendering algorithm and some educated guessing about the text a bruit force search may be able to do a very credible job of discovering the actual text. This isn't my field. Anyone out there that has actually worked on this problem?

dylan604 8 hours ago

> the more any font kerning is likely a major leak for redaction

Now I want a font that randomly adjusts the kerning automagically to be used by people in standard word processors not some graphics app. In this way, every time the same word appears in the document, the kerning is different between each one.

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chews 6 hours ago

My autism wants that idea straight into a dumpster fire.

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worewood 12 hours ago

There was a recent vulnerability, where researchers were able to extract information from an encrypted chat session from an LLM, by analyzing packet size/timings of the underlying SSL connection. A classic side-channel attack. Seems possible to draw a parallel between the two.

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mlissner 12 hours ago

Really depends on the length and predictability of the redaction, but yes. If it's short and contextually it's only likely to be either "yes" or "no", you've got it. If it's longer and could contain an unknown person's name along with some other words, well, that's harder.

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jmward01 11 hours ago

I feel like this creates a hash value and the real question is how unique of a value does it represent and how easy it is to narrow it down given throwing a dictionary at it. Similarly, unknown names could likely be teased out like a one-time pad. If they appear in multiple sentences then their randomness quickly repeats and becomes something that potentially could be isolated from the rest of the words around them. This would probably be a fun problem for a cryptography class to work on.

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