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Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

security.apple.com

111–120 of 359 posts

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

#111
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…

Won't the focus length of the camera be wrong?

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

#112

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 syste…

How do you plan to replace the sensor of your phone's main camera (with a device you need), and let it authenticated by the OS, and then create authenticated photographs with it?

Apple/iOS already have part authentication pipeline on its security sensitive devices (TouchID/FaceID). How can camera sensor can't be considered one of those and needs attestation before enabling?

From the document:

> Apple Reference Image leverages custom-designed image sensors in iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max to ensure reliable capture of image data, and relies on Private Cloud Compute, which provides a computational environment for secure photographic processing that cannot be subverted even in the case of device compromise. (emphasis mine)

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

#113
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…

It seems like the two signatures on device are processed on the camera sensor itself, and then post processing is signed by the SEP. Neither of these would be compromised even if you have a full jailbreak.

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

#114
post #104
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

You don’t even need an AI deepfake to edit a video.

AI deepfake or edit video doesn’t pass liveliness checks without all the c2pa or reference image song and pony show.

Insurance companies can monitor the light reflections from the flash that they control or monitor the accelerometer and compare the accelerometer values with the video that they receive.

They could also just update their app to stop accepting photos from the album.

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

#115

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…

Insurance agencies worried about fraud could just do what they did prior to smartphones: have you bring the car to a claims adjuster at your local office. I’ve brought cars to be inspected, because I got T-boned at an intersection by a careless driver before smartphones existed; it was reasonably quick and hassle-free.

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

#116

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 fundam…

It looks like the reason for the custom timestamp setup is to assert and upper and lower bound on time. A normal timestamp server can asset it saw the image at a certain time but not that the image wasn’t created much earlier. This setup, the image processing pipeline can immediately attach the last seen timestamp to the photo as a lower bound, and then connect to the network to get the upper bound time.

If there is too much of a gap between the upper and lower bounds then the image becomes suspicious.

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

#117

so what happens if you display an extremely high res image of a 100% AI generated fake-something on an 8K display in a photo studio room and take a picture of it with the camera? it gets tagged as authentic.

The timestamp wouldn’t match the event being depicted and the geotag would show the studio. And the depth sensing would show the image as flat.

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

#118

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 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".

Why do you believe Android manufacturers and SOC makers like Qualcomm won’t be able to offer a similar solution?

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

#119

so what happens if you display an extremely high res image of a 100% AI generated fake-something on an 8K display in a photo studio room and take a picture of it with the camera? it gets tagged as authentic.

Was photo not authentic? Think of it "as seen by an iPhone", not "this is authentic event" verification.

But Apple likely would reject such photo because of inappropriate depth map / LiDAR data.

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

#120

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 the vector of this:

An insurance would either assign #1 an insurance agent or mechanic to initially assess the damage (trusted) or #2 ask the customer to send pictures (untrusted).

Tendency is #2 for cost-saving of the insurance, and 3rd party apps are used to execute this.

Now the idea is that the insurance company discontinues the App and the (untrusted) customer must have an iPhone 18 Pro to make an insurance claim?

Or is the insurance agent / mechanic an untrusted entity who will now be required to have an iPhone 18 Pro?

What is the fraud vector here, and how can the insurance service provider continue cost-saving on damage-assessment by offloading to the customer, if the customer is required to own a specific device?

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