Creepy government agency can rebuild your shredded documents

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

DARPA is essentially the government’s Weird Creepy Stuff department. Their mission is to chase the outer edges of science: these are the guys installing robot brains in cockroaches, x-raying the whole planet to look for hidden tunnels, and trying to figure out how to put a death ray into space to explode people at will. But amid the insane mad science, they also invent useful things like the Internet. And now they’ve figured out a way to save that important document you just destroyed.

Specifically, the challenge, creatively called the “DARPA Shredder Challenge”, put up a $50,000 prize for the team that could reconstruct five shredded documents using a computer algorithm. The idea, of course, is to ultimately scale it up so that anything shredded and dumped in a big pile of hamster bedding can be reconstructed by just scanning the shreds and running a program.

And not only did scientists rise to the challenge, the winning team, “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” (really, guys? Nerdy and old meme?) knocked it out two days earlier than the deadline. The algorithm actually uses both the marks on the paper and the specific shape of the shred to reassemble a clean scan of the document.

Does this mean that anything you shred is no longer insecure? Of course it does! But that didn’t stop the team leader from saying that the challenge was really hard and reconstructing huge piles of shredded documents would take a lot of computing power and it’s really unlikely that DARPA would be able to take a big bin of shredded documents and reconstruct them.

That’d take a supercomputer! Good thing DARPA isn’t building one 1000 times faster than current supercomputers! Then we might be in real trouble!

DARPA’s Shredder Challenge Solved Two Days Early [New Scientist]

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