Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Yes, the whole insurance self-service is built on smartphones having a camera.

But the assumption that smartphone cameras, including those used in 99USD smartphones, will become 100% cryptographic cameras in a few years is highly unlikely, considering that those cameras didn't even gain OIS in the last 13 years despite the feature being highly matured and widely available.

Changing the topic to other features won't change that.

You seem to lack the understanding how this industry works, and assume that every development naturally just trickles down and becomes a commodity. This is not the case.

This cryptographic feature will definitely become available from camera sensor suppliers, first of all likely from Sony. But it will be a feature of premium sensors and will remain a differentiation factor.

Sony will not support cryptography to its sensors without additional cost. Device-vendors integrating those sensors then have additional cost in R&D, production AND operations. All this will not be waived and put in a 99USD device.

For the other assumption, that "If this type of thing becomes required", I fail to see how this should happen for a mass-market consumer: This feature doesn't authenticate the content of an image, it just authenticates the RAW data of the image sensor. It won't (and shouldn't!) make the user more trusted towards another entity (like Apple mentions themselves in the link)

> images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"

No, because images will be confirmed to have been taken on "this iPhone". The New York Times will be able to publish an article and to attest that the photographs shown were taken by their journalists, and then your user agent will verify that provenience.

> 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".

You have it all wrong.

Apple Reference Image is not an id system; it's primarily a way to attest that the pixels recorded by the camera sensor have not been altered in any way; the pixels, metadata and timestamp are all cryptographically signed.

There's no way to link a reference image to a person; it's also not possible to determine if a pair of images came from the same device.

> And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case

This is incorrect:

    When the image sensor is first initialized in the factory, it creates a
    cryptographic signing identity, sharing only the public key with the
    factory. The SEP similarly creates a separately-attested signing
    identity. These identities are bound together into the device manifest,
    allowing us to later check whether a particular sensor and SEP are from
    the same device.

    The final signature on a reference image is a composite post-quantum
    signature combining RSA-3072 and ML-DSA-87. To our knowledge, Apple
    Reference Image is the only image provenance system that provides
    quantum-secure defenses.

So… a nation-state can't really do anything here unless they acquire alien technology. If something crazy happens (solar flare or EMP?), a fraudulent reference image can be revoked.

> Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

I would imagine there will be a way to confirm an Apple Reference Image on the web. Pretty soon, 3rd parties will be able to verify the image themselves:

    Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main
    image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and
    determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and
    macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.

Too much potential for revealing the identities of others there.

Yrs; that is what world needs, complete dependency on one giga corporation... I cannot wait for it to happen!