Researchers detail “aCropalypse”, a bug in Google Pixel's Markup fixed in March 2023, where some edited screenshots can be retroactively unredacted or uncropped
Screenshot recovery utility Alan Friedman / PhoneArena : Pixel vulnerability that hits the Markup screenshot editing tool is potentially dangerous Emma Roth / The Verge : Google Pixel exploit reverses edited parts of screenshots Igor Bonifacic / Engadget : Google Pixel vulnerability allows bad actors to undo Markup screenshot edits and redactions Martin Brinkmann / gHacks Technology News : Google Pixel Privacy nightmare: redacted or cropped screenshots may be recovered (partially) David Buchanan's Blog : Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering Truncated PNGs Tweets: Simon Aarons / @itssimontime : Introducing acropalypse: a serious privacy vulnerability in the Google Pixel's inbuilt screenshot editing tool, Markup, enabling partial recovery of the original, unedited image data of a cropped and/or redacted screenshot. Huge thanks to @David3141593 for his help throughout! https://twitter.com/... David Buchanan / @david3141593 : This bug is a bad one. You can patch it, but you can't easily un-share all the vulnerable images you may have sent. The bug existed for about 5 years before being patched, which is mind-blowing given how easy it is to spot when you look closely at an output file. https://twitter.com/... Mike Pound / @_mikepound : This seems to affect all pixels for the last few years, that's an astronomical number of potentially “un-croppable” images across a variety of platforms. Mike Pound / @_mikepound : This acropalypse bug is a big deal. Google pixel phones that perform a screenshot crop aren't removing the original image data, just overwriting it starting from the top. The crop is usually smaller, and so original image is left intact. The image is Huffman encoded, so 1/ @sosintel : Those of you who use Google pixel phones and have ever shared a cropped image may want to consider this little operational security risk... https://twitter.com/... Jon Gjengset / @jonhoo : Oof, this is pretty bad. The fact that many sites re-compress images helps, but not everywhere does (e.g., Discord)... https://twitter.com/... Phil Eaton / @eatonphil : When overwriting a file, remember to truncate. 🙂 https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/ ... Dominic White / @singe : Recovering original photo data from Google Pixel 7 cropped photos. https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/ ... Modified photos are written over the original without truncation. Compressed with dynamic Huffman encoding and the tree is re-specified every approximately 16KB. Allows recovery. (1/2) @rreverser : 😨 This vulnerability sounds like it came straight from CSI. “Okay, Google, uncrop this image.” https://twitter.com/... @leonjza : Crazy, looks like an API change, no, footgun in parseMode that changed the behavior from having “w” mode also truncate a file to needing to be specific if you need truncation instead (with “wt"). Result? In some cases you can uncrop cropped screenies. ref: https://issuetracker.google.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Dominic White / @singe : Root cause is a fail to truncate the file when writing the new image. You can test if your images are impacted here https://acropalypse.app/ (runs client side) Gray parts are unrecoverable parts. (2/2)
Context & Ripple Effects
The disclosure builds on earlier reporting on the recently fixed Pixel Markup flaw: a common on-device editing workflow did not reliably make removed image content unrecoverable. That makes the issue more consequential than an ordinary image-editing defect, because users may have shared screenshots assuming crops and redactions were permanent.
It also lands amid heightened scrutiny of Google-device security after Project Zero identified Exynos modem zero-days affecting some Google phones. The distinction matters: this is an application-level privacy failure, but it can still expose information users deliberately tried to withhold.
First-order effects
- Pixel users who created and shared affected Markup-edited screenshots need to treat prior crops and redactions as potentially reversible, rather than as reliable deletion.
- Google’s March 2023 fix closes the vulnerable behavior for updated Markup use, while the disclosure clarifies the privacy risk attached to older edited files.
Second-order effects
- Screenshot and image-editing products face pressure to test whether their “redact” and “crop” functions actually remove underlying data, not merely hide it from view.
- The appearance of a similar Windows Snipping Tool issue suggests the failure mode is not confined to one vendor and may prompt broader audits of image-export pipelines.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, visual redaction will increasingly be treated as a security guarantee requiring verifiable data removal, not as a cosmetic editing feature.
- The episode reinforces the need for capture- and export-layer provenance: users and receiving systems need clearer signals about what an image edit did—and did not—irreversibly remove.
The trend: Consumer-device privacy is shifting from trust in visible editing controls toward verification that sensitive data has actually been removed from the underlying file.