31–40 of 153 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah this is what I don't get why are people even spending time on this.
I can break it with zero skills. Tripod, camera, clear monitor in a dark room ... just take a real photo of a fake photo.
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.
Unfortunately they're a little outside of my tinkering budget, but if anyone wants to send me some I'll do my best to pwn them. Can't be any harder than a Google flagship, one would imagine. I have ordered a faulty Sony A7 IV motherboard, but due to its faulty-ness and the lack of the rest of the camera, I'm not sure how far I'll be able to get with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There were similar fears about the webtrust CA system, but AFAIK there's no known incidents where a government strongarmed a CA into misissuing a MITM certificate, and then it was used in MITM attacks. The closest is some misissued certificates seemingly due to incompetence but weren't used in attacks.
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:)
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.
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 re…
>Images captured with an opt-in Reference mode can be authenticated to confirm they were taken with an iPhone. Authenticating is done by tapping the Reference badge on the image, which sends the raw image, sensor signatures, capture time frame, and the unique hardware identifiers of the sensor to Apple's Private Cloud Compute (PCC) servers. PCC uses the information to determine whether the camera captured the photo, gives it a unique ID, and then returns an authenticated version to the user's device.
You will not build a perfect system, or even something near perfect. The best you're going to do is make it so that it's hard to casually present AI photos as real, leaving only the cases where it really matters. In the "best" case, you've just made the public more trusting of photos in general, so that when there's actual money or power on the line that makes jumping through the hoops to fake authenticity worth it, the public is more susceptible.
The best outcome at this point is for everyone to get on the same page that photos have roughly the same probative value now as drawings. Poorly thought out snake oil efforts to prove authenticity are only going to delay that.