Special Issue  _____  Augmented Privacy Masking Technology

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Smartphones to Protect Personal Information

Addressing Intensifying Issues of Personal Information Protection

In an era of rapidly changing information and communications technologies, personal information leakage has become a serious issue. In Korea, some large credit card companies and entities in the financial sector were involved in a series of nationwide scandals of personal information leakage. Despite a number of problems that must be addressed by policy measures, the only direct solution was for individual customers to minimize the risk of having their personal information stolen.
Amidst this trend, ETRI has successfully developed a technology to protect personal information: augmented privacy masking technology. When users take a photograph of their ID card with their smartphone, the technology automatically detects the personal information such as resident registration number and masks such information before saving it as a file, thereby preventing any incidents of personal information leakage.
If such a file is leaked, access to the personal information is ultimately impossible. Since the personal information is automatically detected and encrypted both online and offline and is masked as blurry images, only authorized users or specified devices can access the personal information.

Core Technologies Including Encrypted Algorithms and Personal Area Detection

ETRI explained that this technology was developed as independent from codec types and therefore is readily compatible with a number of extensions, such as the generally used JPEG file type for photographs, MPEG file type for videos, and document file types. Smartphones are used for automatically detecting and masking personal information included in image files or photographs and then restoring the original images later. The core technologies include the codec-independent masking technology coupled with encrypted algorithms and a technology to detect the fields of personal information.
Sponsored by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Technology under a project to develop core original technologies for information protection, this latest technology was developed to procure security technology to protect sensitive personal information in atypical forms such as images and videos.
In the future, the technology is expected to be used for various purposes related to personal information protection: ID card information and documents submitted to financial or communications companies; car license numbers in CCTV or car black box footage; and addresses printed on parcel packages. In addition, it can be universally used for a range of devices including smartphones, personal computers, and scanners. The beauty of the technology is that it can be easily installed as software applications in authorized devices.

New Paradigm for Personal Information Protection

ETRI’s technology will prove its usefulness as the Personal Information Protection Act in Korea requires mandatory encryption of atypical data included in various types of ID card copies, contracts, and application forms included in the database held by the financial sector.
The technology also has a new concept to enhance the security of private information exposed in everyday lives. Since it can be widely used not only for documents saved in computers, but also for hard copies, fax documents, and other offline documents as well as videos, the technology is expected to present a new paradigm for protection of personal information.
ETRI has applied for original patents related to this technology and plans to commercialize the technology in phase in partnership with unmanned banks, codec companies, DB security companies, logistics businesses, and personal medical device suppliers. Further, the institute is going to complete the development of the O2O (online to offline) augmented privacy masking technology by the first half of 2018 to prevent incidents of personal information leakage from offline documents.
Once this technology is applied to O2O service, the personal information (e.g. name, address) printed on the waybills on parcel packages or mail will be made non-identifiable. As a result, a secure service will be provided by allowing only couriers to see such information with their smartphones. ETRI’s security technology designed for protection of personal information will contribute to bringing about a secure, reliable society.