Some customers have asked how Automated Redaction works, and how they can be sure that it is permanent and irreversible. Our Development Team has provided the following technical explanation of the redaction process performed in OnBase:
When ‘burning’ redactions onto an image, we open up the image file and actually overwrite all of the pixels stored in the file for the area(s) to be redacted, then save the file back to disk with those pixels completely removed from the file – all of the data that was stored in the redacted regions is irreversibly destroyed because image format files such as TIFF, JPEG, etc. only store within themselves one data point for each pixel on the page, there are no other copies or representations of that pixel anywhere else.
Now there may be other copies of the original image file (prior to our redaction process) in existence – for example if OnBase is configured to create revisions or to redact into a new document type – but security or viewability on these is managed by OnBase user group security and/or NTFS file system security. But in the new redacted copy(ies) of the document page, the pixels making up the redacted information is completely wiped out, and only having one of those copies of the file, there is no way to recreate the redacted information without also having a copy of the original to compare it to.
