Re: [Gimp-developer] Deleting on images with alpha channel does not delete

Ofnuts <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 2/5/20 2:55 PM, Hanno Böck wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been asked to bring this discussion to this mailinglist.
>
> There's an issue with GIMP that can lead to unexpected disclosure of
> private information if one tries to use GIMP to remove private data
> from images.
> The problem is that when someone "deletes" something with GIMP in an
> image with an alpha channel it's not actually deleted, the content is
> just set to be fully transparent. This can of course trivially be
> reversed.
>
> A typical situation where this might become problematic is when somene
> makes a screenshot for e.g. a social media post and wants to remove
> something that is private, e.g. a name/address/creditcard number etc.
>
> Will Dormann who works for CERT/CC has reported this as an issue[1],
> however it was closed arguing that this is expected behavior.
>
> FWIW I agree with Will Dormann here that this is very surprising
> behavior, and thus it should be considered dangerous and should be
> changed. He also told me he tested multiple other popular graphics
> editors and GIMP is the only one with this behavior.
>
> (Also FYI I am planning to write an article about this for Golem.de.)
>
> [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/4487
>
And why should this mailing list make any difference?

I'll even go further in the reasoning. If it makes sense for
PNG/WEBP/GIF, why wouldn't it make sense for the XCF format itself?
After all some poor souls could send someone an XCF where their credit
cars number has been erased in a layer (as a Gimp forum owner, I see
people routinely upload their XCF files fro all to see...). So we would
have to also clear these data in XCF layers, making the whole editor
unusable?

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