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Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

arstechnica.com

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Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#21

Post by illwrks »

traverseda wrote: post #5

You can probably build a rig to feed false data to the sensor, or take a photo of a sufficiently high-resolution display, or use side-channel power analysis to extract the cryptographic keys. I have serious doubts this kind of provenance metadata will actually work against a sophisticated attacker (someone willing to spend more than 100k on making fake images), but I'm sure it will be used as an excuse to further loc…

This is probably useful in a legal context more than anything else. Imagine photos presented as evidence in court... photos taken with a known 'approved' device, with trusted credentials and a way to prove the photos came from said device. I'm sure there are large government contracts for such a device.

Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#25

Post by lxgr »

wenc wrote: post #15

One issue is because there are so few CR cameras out there, most people would sign their photos in Lightroom. So the provenance starts from software rather than capture device. So you can sign a fake photo that you modified and its provenance from that point on is traceable. But you still wouldn’t know if the photo was captured authentically. I guess it doesn’t matter — this is about traceability rather than authenti…

In this use case, it’s arguably the other way around:

The point is to prove that the image was taken in the real world, to stakeholders that might not necessarily take your word for it otherwise.

Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#26

Post by lxgr »

mhitza wrote: post #17
hooverd wrote: post #14

Huh, there has to be a better way to do this than with a proprietary SaaS service.

Of course, allowing consumers to push their custom certs to the chip, without "rooting", instead of having central control.

The point here is that the photographer is not necessarily trusted.

You can already sign a JPEG with your GPG key; that won’t convince anyone that it wasn’t actually photoshopped or outright generated by AI.

The point here is to have a more trusted hardware vendor vouch for their camera not being easy to trick into signing arbitrary data, but only actual images it took itself.

Of course that also puts a lot of pressure on the key generation, storage and processing mechanism of that vendor; trusted computing in this scenario (i.e. the adversary has unrestricted and persistent access to the system) isn’t easy to get right.

Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#27

Post by ncr100 »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #10

"Whenever someone subsequently edits that photo, the changes are recorded to an updated manifest, rebundled with the image, and updated in the Content Credentials database whenever it is reshared on social media. Users who find these images online can click on the CR icon in the [pictures'] corner to pull up all of this historical manifest information as well, providing a clear chain of providence, presumably, all th…

Shall we begin to expect provenance, then? Like, for our own factual informational health?

Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#28

Post by great_psy »

traverseda wrote: post #5

You can probably build a rig to feed false data to the sensor, or take a photo of a sufficiently high-resolution display, or use side-channel power analysis to extract the cryptographic keys. I have serious doubts this kind of provenance metadata will actually work against a sophisticated attacker (someone willing to spend more than 100k on making fake images), but I'm sure it will be used as an excuse to further loc…

I think each camera has its own key. So to do any side channel attack you would need to steal the camera, in which case you can just take a picture of a printout in a lab and then it’s all signed by the camera.

The signature just says who took the picture, not that the image is not ai generated.

Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#29

Post by onetimeuse92304 »

lxgr wrote: post #24
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #19

There is one hitch. What if AI-generated content is projected through camera lens? That is pretty simple to do.

Without any visible artifacts? I would imagine that to be quite difficult actually!

Cameras are used to scan analog film. I have used it in the past, it works perfectly and there is no way for you to tell it was scanned this way.

But here is an alternative:

You pass an image through a lens, you take photo from the camera. Now, having the input original AI-generated image and photo with the artifacts you calculate what changes your camera introduces. You reverse it to know what needs to be modified in original image to get photo exactly as you want. If one pass does not suffice, you do multiple passes.

Yes, it is easy, as in a CS or math student can do it.

Re: Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

#30

Post by vr46 »

chrisa wrote: post #6

Worth noting that the expensive price isn't because of the metadata feature - it's a new version of the Leica M11 which is $8995 itself (Leicas are just crazy expensive)

The non-Ms are beautifully made and worth every penny (eg Q2, SL) but the Ms are beautifully made terrible technology - specifically the rangefinder: they’re delicate, need frequent servicing and can only focus down to 0.7m, so the advent of live view finally allows lenses that go closer than 0.7m to be focused. That said, I just bought a Canon 7D from 2009 and it too is beautifully made.

However, I think the digital signing is a good way to provide the photographer with proof that the picture in the paper/competition is the picture that they made with the camera and not their pal Midjourney.

Why they put it in such a sluggish contraption, I don’t know, but probably a good place to start compared to a Z9 and trying to tag pictures at 500 frames a second or whatever.

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