Author: Robert Ransom Date: To: julien.voisin CC: tor-assistants, tails-dev Subject: Re: [T(A)ILS-dev] [tor-assistants] Another GSoC proposal for the
meta-data anonymizing toolkit
On Wed, 6 Apr 2011 23:41:57 +0200
"julien.voisin" <julien.voisin@???> wrote:
> >What file formats do you intend to support initially?
> >I think PDF, images, audio and video files are the most important to
> >support to start with. What do you think? > I think I'll focus on :
> - pdf
> - mpeg audio
> - ogg
> - bmp/gif/jpeg/png
> - exe
> - archives (bzip2, zip, tar)
How do you plan to anonymize ‘exe’ files? The machine code in a
compiled program often contains information about the compiler which
produced it, so scrubbing off the clearly marked metadata is not
sufficient.
Similarly, audio, video, and image data captured by a hardware device
can often be linked to other data captured by the same device, and
files in formats that use lossy compression are also likely to contain
subtle fingerprints of the compressor which produced them. Do you plan
to research and develop tools that try to remove those fingerprints?
(A tool which simply scrubs off the explicitly provided metadata would
still be useful to experts, but it would need to warn users that the
resulting files may still contain fingerprints which could link them to
the users' devices and/or software configuration and to other
previously published files which contain ‘personally identifying
information’ or intact metadata.)
