You are one underpaid random guy in India looking at CSAM all day clicking the wrong button away from a raid of your home and the end of your life as you know it.
Yes. Once you're accused, your life is over. Nobody will pay any attention to a news article the next week saying they found nothing.
You're assuming the police are nice and quickly announce when
they haven't found anything.
The more likely outcome is that it takes several months until the case is dropped silently.
Seems pretty trivial to have different servers sides per country, and put there a different db. EU, China, Iran, US: everyone gets to spy on their own children and forbid whatever they want.
It would be good, I think, if people read Apple's threat assessment before calling it "pretty trivial": > • Database update transparency: it must not be possible to surreptitiously change the encrypted CSAM database that’s used by the process. > • Database and software universality: it must not be possible to target specific accounts with a different encrypted CSAM database, or with different software performing the…
That's a lovely technical solution! It will last right up until the CCP rubber-hoses[0] Apple with "add these hashes or stop selling iPhones in China".
Apple will cave. They've demonstrated the technology works. The CCP is paying attention. Look for this feature to be mandated across all phones soon. Pandora's box has been opened.
People’s photo libraries are scanned. The result is the same.
Only if you’re putting your stuff in the cloud. There’s a big difference between my files on my computer and my files on someone else’s computer. Or at least there should be, IMO.
Yeah, only if you're putting your stuff in the cloud. The result is the same.
> '100% verified' Just reading those words is rage-inducing, but I'm grateful to have learnt this example of government lying. I feel like it should become an expression that societies teach to their children to warn them about abuses of power. Other mottoes synonymous with government deception and corruption come to mind, but at the risk of being too controversial I will share only their initials and dates: "SAARH"…
Because I delight in delivering bad news, I'll point out that the real takeaway shouldn't be that federal LEOs regularly lie (though, they do) - it is that they are permitted to lie convincingly through handwavy technical means. All these tools are designed to give them permission to totally destroy your life. I'm aware of only two geewiz CSI methods that are actually founded in science: cryptography (this neural cra…
DNA is only mostly founded in science. There's the interpretive element in saying: Oh, this DNA matches the suspect, even though it's mixed with the victim's blood.
Nice big clean sample? It probably actually matches. Small sample? Mixed with other people's DNA? Especially in a place they tend to visit (or live in?)?
I’m much more worried about adversarial attacks rather than accidental false positives. For example, a year ago I was trying to track down how some unscrupulous photos ended up in my photo library. I finally realized that Telegram had, without my knowing permission, been adding all photos I had received in a crypto discussion group to my Apple photo library. There seem many ripe opportunities for targeting.
This kind of thing is why you really can’t have conversations on phones in confidence. You really have no idea what the chat client on your phone (much less the other person’s) is doing.
> In order to test things, I decided to search the publicly available ImageNet dataset for collisions between semantically different images. I generated NeuralHashes for all 1.43 million images and searched for organic collisions. By taking advantage of the birthday paradox, and a collision search algorithm that let me search in n(log n) time instead of the naive n^2, I was able to compare the NeuralHashes of over 2…
>2 in 2 trillion image pairs Reporting the collision rate per image pair feels misleading. What you really want to know is the number of false positives per image in the relevant set, not image pair, as that's the figure that indicates how frequently you'll hit a false positive.
Those should only differ by a factor of 2 [the collision rate for an image is the number of collisions it has divided by the number of other images, so the average collision rate is the total collisions divided by n(n-1) vs. n(n-1)/2 pairs] which isn't particularly relevant at this scale
Why is this question being downvoted? I too would like to know what this attack achieves. From what I see, the end result of false flagging is either someone has CSAM in iCloud and you push them over the threshold that results in reporting and prosecution, or there is no CASM, so the reviewer sees all of the hash collision images, including those that are natural. Is the problem that an attacker can force natural has…
You are one underpaid random guy in India looking at CSAM all day clicking the wrong button away from a raid of your home and the end of your life as you know it.
Could you explain this? The process, according to what's publicly known, is that the images will go to NCMEC for further review, then NCMEC will report it to the authorities, if it's actually CSAM. The low paid (a big assumption here) Apple reviewer is only the final step for Apple, not prosecution.
>2 in 2 trillion image pairs Reporting the collision rate per image pair feels misleading. What you really want to know is the number of false positives per image in the relevant set, not image pair, as that's the figure that indicates how frequently you'll hit a false positive.
Those should only differ by a factor of 2 [the collision rate for an image is the number of collisions it has divided by the number of other images, so the average collision rate is the total collisions divided by n(n-1) vs. n(n-1)/2 pairs] which isn't particularly relevant at this scale
You care about the total number of collisions, not collisions for a specific image, so they differ by a square -- hence the 1 in a trillion vs million difference.
Why is this question being downvoted? I too would like to know what this attack achieves. From what I see, the end result of false flagging is either someone has CSAM in iCloud and you push them over the threshold that results in reporting and prosecution, or there is no CASM, so the reviewer sees all of the hash collision images, including those that are natural. Is the problem that an attacker can force natural has…
The idea I've heard is that images could be generated that are sexual in nature but that have been altered to match a CSAM hash, making a tricky situation.
That's an interesting point! From my understanding, Apple's hash is not the final qualifier. SCMEC also reviews them before reporting to the authorities. But, I can imagine a scenario that might require opinion.
Because I delight in delivering bad news, I'll point out that the real takeaway shouldn't be that federal LEOs regularly lie (though, they do) - it is that they are permitted to lie convincingly through handwavy technical means. All these tools are designed to give them permission to totally destroy your life. I'm aware of only two geewiz CSI methods that are actually founded in science: cryptography (this neural cra…
DNA is only mostly founded in science. There's the interpretive element in saying: Oh, this DNA matches the suspect, even though it's mixed with the victim's blood. Nice big clean sample? It probably actually matches. Small sample? Mixed with other people's DNA? Especially in a place they tend to visit (or live in?)?
At that point the problem isn't the science behind DNA, it is the fact that your freedom depends on a jury understanding statistics. But at least there exists the opportunity to challenge the evidence on objective grounds, that unfortunately requires an expensive professional expert witness...