The Importance of Secure Redaction
There is simply no room for redaction fails in 2025. They are as lazy as they are dangerous!
Redaction is of critical importance in business. It enables crucial information to be shared and collaborated on while ensuring confidential and regulated information like social security numbers, personally identifiable information and business secrets are protected. However, despite how important it is – and how important everybody knows it is – we are continually seeing organizations fail to do it properly. Either due to user-error, or software inadequacies.
Indeed, Judge Herbert B. Dixon Jr. has repeatedly written on the subject and has called it “a digital-age nemesis” when writing for the American Bar Association following a slew of redaction failures damaging the legal sector. Meanwhile, Victoria Police had to apologize to 186 witnesses, victims and police officers last year after their redacted personal information was unredacted by an incarcerated prisoner during pre-trial discovery obligations. Thus revealing sensitive information including their names and addresses.
One of the biggest causes of redaction fails is how often organizations, governments and legal bodies rely on the most simplistic techniques to hide information – including simply hiding it behind black boxes. For example a CBSA (Canada Border Services Agency) manager admitted in an affidavit that staff simply highlighted the information they were instructed to redact for legal and privacy purposes and changed the colour from yellow to black in order to obscure it from view. However, while this offers a superficial obscuring of the information, the sections can simply be copied and pasted in order for the contents to be revealed again.
And while this was very publicly revealed in 2021, nothing has changed. Indeed, in late 2023 a lawsuit filed in Florida that was redacted online is also viewable by copying and pasting the text in the same way. Meanwhile, also in 2023, Sony reportedly had court documents removed from the Microsoft vc FTC court case due to an even less technical redaction fail: The failed use of a sharpie marker to black out certain text.
It is simply ridiculous that anybody is using these techniques to redact information in 2024.
What’s more, it’s dangerous.
After all, while it may be amusing to read about huge companies and organizations embarrassing themselves like this, there are real victims. For example people having their details released through legal documents when the cases were meant to be kept quiet. Or people having their addresses leaked in potentially dangerous circumstances.
So, what’s the solution?
OmniIndex uses homomorphic encryption technology to redact information inside documents and other files. This is done both automatically when a file is saved and closed, and manually by training the Small Language Model AI engine to redact information that adheres to a set pattern. For example:
#US SSN ^(?!(.)(\\1|-)+$)(?!000|666|9..)(?!...-?00)(?!.*0000$)\d{3}(-?)\d\d\3\d{4}$
As this redaction is done with encryption, the data can only be seen by someone with the correct encryption key. The encryption is to a military standard based on Synchronous AES 256 using the CryptoPP libraries which are deemed uncrackable through brute-force attacks.
What’s more, because it is OmniIndex’s patented homomorphic encryption, this encrypted data can still be searched and analyzed by authorized and authenticated users while it remains redacted.
While that may initially seem a contradiction and counter intuitive, it can have a number of crucial benefits for users. Read the next article in this OmniIndex series to learn 8 potential benefits of this redaction technology, including secure data analysis, real-time decision making and enhanced possibilities in data collaboration.