LokPix - The Privacy-Enhanced Photo Application
Every day, mobile phones containing valuable business information are lost or stolen. A recent study found that the loss of a single laptop could cost a company upwards of $50,000. And with more and more people using their increasingly-sophisticated phones as business tools, the loss figures will only grow. And how many times have celebrities had their phones stolen or hacked into, leading to private photos winding up all over the Internet.
LokPix is a solution for part of this problem. It's an innovative Photo application for Android smartphones that gives you a measure of privacy for your pictures. Capture a picture with the built-in camera, and it's saved directly to the SD card in an encrypted form. If you lose your phone in a taxi, your phone is hacked, or it's simply stolen, the pictures secured with LokPix will be safe from prying eyes.
If Scarlett Johansson or Paris Hilton had used this app, they would have been saved much embarassment.
LokPix consists of a Camera module with a variety of modes and settings for nearly every situation, and a Gallery showing the secured photos, with a panning, zooming Viewer. It can Export photos to the Android Gallery application (loosing the encryption of course), and can Import photos taken with the Android Camera application, or received via email or SMS. Plus, it lets you divide your secure photo collection into virtual albums, each of which may be made invisible to anyone without the correct key.
There are currently 2 versions of LokPix. LokPixLite is a personal-use, demonstration of the features and capabilities of the program. It's security level is low, making it suitable for casual use only. Howerver, it's free to use for as long as it meets your needs.
LokPixPro incorporates a much more powerful encryption algorithm (AES), as well as additional features. If you are serious about protecting your photos, this should provide a reasonable level of security.
New features become available in LokPixPro first, then some will eventually make their way to the Lite version.
Features
- Camera capture with many more exposure options than the built-in camera application. Special modes for unusual lighting or color effects.
- Built-in picture Gallery and zooming Viewer.
- Convenient operation - quickly switch between Camera and Gallery.
- Multiple Virtual Galleries - just use a different passkey for each set of photos you wish to view as a group.
- Export decrypted photos to the Android Gallery application.
- Import and encrypt photos from the Android Gallery application.
- Secure erase - overwrites the file before deleting it.
- Professional-grade AES encryption (LokPixPro only).
Please use the links in the Navigation Menu on the left to see the features and limitations of the LokPixLite and LokPixPro versions.
Potential Uses
There are many times when you want to take or show photos, but also have a requirement for privacy or confidentiality. For instance:
- Medical professionals documenting patient treatment - comply with HIPAA
- EMTs photographing an accident scene - protect your patient privacy.
- Engineers - carry whiteboard images without risk of industrial espionage
- Executives carrying photos of a prototype to show customers
- Celebrities - are you tired of seeing your personal photos on the net?
- Anyone - carry scanned images of documents (ID card, birth cert., etc.) safely
- Carry images of your credit cards, in case your wallet/purse is stolen.
Anywhere that you have the need to protect your photos from improper disclosure, is the place for LokPix. Your photos are safe, even if someone puts the SD card in a PC to read it.
Comparison with other methods
There are several other photo security applications available, but most of them (to this date) are simple "hiding" applications. That is, they move your picture files from the normal directory to a specially-named directory that doesn't show up in the Android Gallery aplication. Sounds great, right?
Well, what happens when you leave your phone in the cab? Or it gets pick-pocketed at the restaurant? And you've got screen-shots and whiteboard diagrams for your company's latest killer software in there?
A mildly-curious person who finds your phone will either 1) plug it into a USB cable, or 2) remove the SD card and stick it in a reader. And there your pictures are, ripe for the taking. That's because you can't hide the files from an outside Operating System! You can't even really hide them from the Android system - if you have a file manager like "Linda" or "ES File Explorer" installed, it'll find your "hidden" pictures and display them with hardly any effort at all.
So your secret software plans get splashed all over the trade press months before you planned to announce...
Even if you're careful and use a file vault. most of them leave forgotten traces of your pictures lying around on the SD card. If's not hard to run an undeleter or image scavenger on the card, and get back photos that you thought were safely locked up.
LokPix not only keeps it's own copies of the pictures it's protecting, but it carefully encrypts them and can remove all traces of the originals. If someone gets their hands on your phone, they still can't view the pictures without the correct passkey. And you get to keep your job... :-)
How to Use It
The User Documentation is divided into 4 sections:
Main Screen,
Camera,
Gallery, and
Settings. Use the Navigation Menu on the left to go to the appropriate section of the manual.
If you have any questions on the use of passkeys, see the
FAQ or the
Main Screen pages.
Important Reminder: |
If you don't type your passkey in EXACTLY like you did when you saved your photos, those photos won't decrypt. Same case, same spacing - everything EXACTLY THE SAME! |
Passkeys are the keys to the pictures - and you can use more than one key.
Comments?
Technicalities
When LokPix starts up, it checks to make sure the SD card is available. If it is, it then checks for the presence of the directories "/sdcard/dcim/SCamera/preview" and "/sdcard/dcim/SCamera/img" (creating them if they don't already exist).
When you save a picture with Camera, two files are written. A small preview image is encrypted and placed in the SCamera/preview directory. This is the thumbnail that the Gallery loads, which greatly speeds up the process, and saves memory. The full-sized image is then encrypted and stored in SCamera/img. Both files have exactly the same filenames (a number based on the time), and the extension ".jpgs" (or "pngs", "gifs", or "bmps" in LokPixPro).
Every effort is made to maintain the security of your photos. Once the encrypted data is written to the SD card, the copy in the phone's memory is over-written with zeros, then released. This makes it harder for an adversary to grab the raw photo from the camera buffer.
When LokPix erases a photo, it first over-writes each byte of the original file with a zero. This prevents the recovery of "deleted" files from the SD card.