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Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

security.apple.com

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Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#91
post #90

I think this is really good and kudos to Apple for implementing it. The first question that popped into my mind was "what new scenarios of government X forcing Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'individual' this enables?", but I can't think of anything. It seems that all government attack vectors this feature enables are of the type "government X forces Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'Apple'", i.e. a government can tr…

Apple would have to be the only company around and by the time Apple “loses” in court its too late.

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#92

Am wondering why no one is talking about traceability of Photos. Ex: CSAM which Apple was fighting for a long time. I thought this feature was the answer to provide proof of who shot the picture.

According to the description in the article, "an outside observer cannot determine whether any pair of reference images were taken by the same device." and they "avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor"

Whatever that means in detail...

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#93

This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally". There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do…

The main way we combat insurance fraud is by throwing people in jail who do it. I dont think AI faked photos is a major cause of fraud.

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#94
post #90

I think this is really good and kudos to Apple for implementing it. The first question that popped into my mind was "what new scenarios of government X forcing Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'individual' this enables?", but I can't think of anything. It seems that all government attack vectors this feature enables are of the type "government X forces Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'Apple'", i.e. a government can tr…

Though, on second thought, "government X could force Apple to disable feature for members of group Y" seems possible. I'm sure you can come with "Y" quite easily, heard anything about Ed Sheeran's tour?

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#95
That's a lot of words to say "we re-invented C2PA but made worse by getting our servers involved somehow".

Like with C2PA, the entire thing hinges on nobody being able to dump keys or trick the TPM into signing arbitrary image data. The timestamping server is a nice idea (though I don't see why they can't just use a normal timestamping server, I guess to keep control over the protocol) but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that defeated C2PA.

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#96
> Modern cameras rely on sophisticated image-processing algorithms to produce the final viewable image, so certifying that an image accurately reflects what a real camera sensor captured requires a chain of trust covering the sensor as well as the computational photography software that interpreted the capture.

So if you jailbreak or root your phone what happens? Is this a trojan horse into making rooted phone cameras unverified? Just like how Linux machines can't watch Netflix in 4K

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#98
post #96

> Modern cameras rely on sophisticated image-processing algorithms to produce the final viewable image, so certifying that an image accurately reflects what a real camera sensor captured requires a chain of trust covering the sensor as well as the computational photography software that interpreted the capture. So if you jailbreak or root your phone what happens? Is this a trojan horse into making rooted phone camera…

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Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#99
post #3

Apple doesn't address the modified photo replay situation, where you take a picture of an already edited image. Photoshop / AI-gen an image -> display on a high-resolution monitor -> photograph the monitor with iPhone 18 Pro -> valid Apple Reference image. To get valid reference photos, you can go to the actual physical location, put the iPhone/monitor in a cardboard box to block external light, then photograph the m…

Exactly, a wave of “verified” fake images are coming.

Re: Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

#100
post #63

I‘ve been wondering whether the contact tracking features introduced for Covid 19 could be used to verify that pictures of an event where taken by people who were actually around the scene. That way you‘d have some reassurance that a given picture was actually from the event. Combined with pictures from different angles from different people and some kind of verified photography should make alterations harder.

I’m fairly sure that the contact tracing feature has been removed now. And it wouldn’t be needed anyway, the iPhone location services are far more useful. I imagine the geotag could be included with the verification.

Location services is quite hard to trick. To the point people have gone to the lengths of putting iPhones inside a microwave for RF shielding and setting up fake phone tower signals inside to trick the phone in to unlocking the hearing aid feature on AirPods for unapproved countries.

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