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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

#101

Post by Gigachad »

modeless wrote: post #79

This is so insanely complex and requires placing trust in the correctness of so many pieces, many of them closed-source. And uploading every verified "developed" image to Apple's servers. And giving up full control of the software and hardware you "own". All to achieve a goal of "verifying" photons, which is only a part of the real problem of verifying the truth of an event that was photographed. I hope that companie…

Because it’s impossible to implement this feature in open source and out in the open. It relies on a locked down image pipeline and hidden key.

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

#102

Post by Gigachad »

codetiger wrote: post #80

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.

Nothing stops you not verifying, or simply stripping the verification off.

What you are prevented from doing is adding a verification to a photo outside of the iOS image pipeline, or modifying the photo with the verification still in tact.

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

#103

Post by bawolff »

This is cool, but also seem really complex and i'm not sure it makes sense pragmatically.

- it sounds like its an optional mode you have to enable. That kind of defeats the point if you need to prove something after the fact

- i guess you need internet to take a picture. :(

- You are puting a lot of trust in apple's private cloud compute platform.

- apple can revoke certification of a picture. I understand the appeal of this, all security systems eventually have failures, so its important to be robust against this. However if the point is to prove a picture is real (especially politically damaging ones), this is giving a lot of power to apple.

Its meant to be in competition with C2PA, and i guess the idea is its much more secure against complex hardware attacks. However i think its worth asking who the target audience is and what threats they face. The primary issue with AI is it makes fake photos easy, not that it invented fake photos. Even Stalin manipulated photos back in the day. It is not a new thing, the problem is just being overwhelmed with them.

with that in mind, are complex hardware attacks really that important? We just need to increase the difficulty floor, not solve fake photos for all time. No matter what you do, people can still use practical effects.

It seems like this is almost trying to thwart spies and nation state adversaries, well forgetting that such well funded groups have the budget to fake photos the old fashioned way or if they really cared, bribe their way into apple.

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

#104

Post by ben_w »

itake wrote: post #76
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #62

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…

I don’t understand what this brings to the table beyond what we’re currently doing. Insurance companies can have a native app and require the device’s camera. Companies already have tools to combat a liveliness check. Even if you’re using a modified app that pulls from the photo album instead of the camera? A video recording with the appropriate liveness verification easily avoids that mess.

As per opening paragraph of link, AI fakes are a thing.

It's been possible to do a live video deepfake for a long time now, but as with all new tech, law and society are taking their sweet time to understand the risks; IMO this is the other side of the same coin as some infamous tech comments on consumer products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 and https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rob_Malda

NVIDIA suggested AI fakes controlled with face tracking input as a compression technique just for reducing video call bandwidth requirements (to ~117 bytes per frame). They did that six years ago: https://www.dpreview.com/news/5756257699/nvidia-research-dev...

As we're now in an AI race, even NVIDIA's specific technique has flaws which all the current tools can detect, there's never any guarantee of this continuing to be the case.

That said, in the case of Apple, they're historically followers not leaders despite the public image they like to present about innovation, and I'd expect this method to be flawed from day one even if we weren't reading a corporate blog post written in a self-congratulatory tone I find almost as off-putting as when AI write.

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

#106

Post by tempay »

bawolff wrote: post #93
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #62

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.

At least in the UK this seems to be a growing problem and jail isn't a scalable solution. See for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2rr9pg4jzo

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

#107

Post by archagon »

alwillis wrote: post #67
brookst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought about it and also are bright enough not to fall for the “if a single person dies wearing a seat belt, we should abandon seat belts because they do no good at all” fallacy. It’s almost certainly possible to fool v1 of this system, for some images, in some contexts. It would be shocking if the first implementation was completely perfect. But maybe it’s better than nothing?

> It’s almost certainly possible to fool v1 of this system, for some images, in some contexts. It would be shocking if the first implementation was completely perfect. Knowing Apple, they've been working on and testing Apple Reference Image for years. It being perfect isn't the issue; it's that random people on the internet who are just learning about this assume Apple's engineers haven't already thought about everyt…

If they thought about it, then why isn't this very obvious failure point even mentioned in the technical breakdown?

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

#108

Post by ben_w »

alwillis wrote: post #67
brookst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought about it and also are bright enough not to fall for the “if a single person dies wearing a seat belt, we should abandon seat belts because they do no good at all” fallacy. It’s almost certainly possible to fool v1 of this system, for some images, in some contexts. It would be shocking if the first implementation was completely perfect. But maybe it’s better than nothing?

> It’s almost certainly possible to fool v1 of this system, for some images, in some contexts. It would be shocking if the first implementation was completely perfect. Knowing Apple, they've been working on and testing Apple Reference Image for years. It being perfect isn't the issue; it's that random people on the internet who are just learning about this assume Apple's engineers haven't already thought about everyt…

> It being perfect isn't the issue; it's that random people on the internet who are just learning about this assume Apple's engineers haven't already thought about everything (and more) mentioned in this thread.

Given how many bugs there are in macOS and how long they have remained there, I (who have been writing iOS apps from the release of the first retina iPod touch until AI got good) functionally agree with such people; at best, I think Apple's engineers haven't actually solved everything (and more) mentioned in this thread, even if every one of these things may have come up in discussions and even reached an official backlog or task list or similar.

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

#109

Post by Gigachad »

osy wrote: post #5
tristanj wrote: 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…

It also doesn't prevent you from staging an image or anything that's existed since photography was invented. But that's not the problem they're trying to solve. > Today, powerful, widely available AI tools allow users to easily generate or alter photorealistic images to a degree that was difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Photoshop has existed for decades and so has fake images. This is a low friction way to…

This has been possible since the beginning of photography and yet I can’t think of a single scenario where people have been tricked by a staged photo. Yet every day hundreds of millions of people are being fooled by AI generated photos.

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

#110

Post by RandomGerm4n »

This approach assumes that the smartphone in question is not under the user’s control. That should generally not be the case. When I buy a device, I have the right to install whatever I want on it and to make the camera sensors believe whatever I want. If something cannot be implemented securely under these circumstances, it’s not a good idea, and other solutions are needed. I once tested a video identification system for a company that the manufacturer claimed was absolutely secure. All it took was rooting the smartphone and bypassing the root detection. After that, you could play any pre recorded video, which would then be recognized as camera input. Under those conditions, it was easy to manipulate a video so that a company employee would consider it real enough to verify the test subject.

It’s simply not technically possible to verify the authenticity of the camera input with 100% certainty. Pretending that it is possible only creates problems. Then someone fakes evidence, but all the normies who have no clue about technology assume that it must be real. You see this with AI detectors too they recognize random texts as generated, yet an unbelievable number of people believe them.

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