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C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

da.vidbuchanan.co.uk

11–20 of 153 posts

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#11
post #7

I have a feeling Apple is going to knock it out of the park on this when they get around to it. They have a great foundation for doing image provenance well. The device attestation workflows are already there. And the same attacks that work against Android won't be as easy or effective because of Secure Enclave. Apple could run the whole signing process inside SEP. And, Apple could choose to integrate a LiDAR depth m…

Apple isn’t going to touch this with a 10-foot pole.

The provenance “proof” these approaches provide is very tenuous and nowhere near the “this is a real photo of a real world event taken by a real camera and not an AI image” proof that marketing types like to push.

Apple doesn’t want a PR disaster where some crazy image is totally fake but becomes world news because it is “cryptographically signed as being from a real iPhone so it must be real!”

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#12
Even at the hardware level, if it was a separate chip that the camera data passed through or something, that's not really good enough either, people have broken TPMs before. It'd have to be baked into the camera sensor. Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that.

I don't think completely solving this sort of problem is even possible.

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#13

Even at the hardware level, if it was a separate chip that the camera data passed through or something, that's not really good enough either, people have broken TPMs before. It'd have to be baked into the camera sensor. Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that. I don't think completely solving this sort of problem is even possible.

And I'm not sure it's even useful to solve. The presence/absence of a digital signature will never be the deciding factor in whether people accept/reject an image as authentic.

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#15

Even at the hardware level, if it was a separate chip that the camera data passed through or something, that's not really good enough either, people have broken TPMs before. It'd have to be baked into the camera sensor. Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that. I don't think completely solving this sort of problem is even possible.

And in 2026, I don't think it's too big of a stretch to imagine that there are going to be people in power that can add + remove the metadata to whatever image they want, at will, to tell whatever story they want to create. Sadly.

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#18
post #14

I can break it with zero skills. Tripod, camera, clear monitor in a dark room ... just take a real photo of a fake photo.

That might be detectable if they signed content contains focal-length metadata... but even then, some foresight and a collection of lenses would hide it.

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#19

I would be interested in a note on whether Sony / Leica / Olympus “content credentials” do any better with their hardware to ensure a signature is assigned to data straight off the sensor.

Why would someone paying for an expensive camera to damage the pixels of their images with "invisible" watermarks?

Re: C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

#20

Even at the hardware level, if it was a separate chip that the camera data passed through or something, that's not really good enough either, people have broken TPMs before. It'd have to be baked into the camera sensor. Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that. I don't think completely solving this sort of problem is even possible.

> Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that.

The analog hole is alive and well:)

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