USC research team develops a way to encrypt a crucial
portion of the photo to keep it secure, while leaving enough unencrypted that
it can still be utilized by cloud filesharing services.
In the next five minutes, roughly a half-million photos will
be shared online.
Embarrassing or not, many are only intended for a certain
audience -- family, or friends maybe -- not the whole world. And yet,
relatively few will be encrypted, leaving them vulnerable to simple data
harvesting.
Thanks to a new tool developed by a research team at USC,
that could all be about to change.
The tool, dubbed "P3" for "Privacy-Preserving
Photo Sharing" removes small amounts of crucial data from a photo and
encrypts them, allowing cloud file-sharing services like Facebook and Flickr to
have only the unencrypted—but now unrecognizable—portion. The photo's owner can
then choose to share the encrypted portion with other parties -- allowing them
to see the whole picture -- without ever uploading it to the cloud.