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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

#51

Post by MisterKent »

brookst wrote: post #27
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, that's only expensive if you're poor. The world is absolutely full of people who can easily piss away your entire annual income throwing a house party. But I really mean that if the lidar barely works outdoors anyway then actually you don't need to be 16 feet away at all. Anyway, one may presume that they've thought about this.

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?

The problem is that if defeating it is trivial, then it _authenticates_ fake images.

The problem is that it makes it easier to fool people and provide "cryptographic" evidence of validity, backed by big tech.

It's purpose is to stop bad actors from passing of fake as real just as much as it is to prevent real images being dismissed as fake.

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

#52

Post by wky »

saagarjha wrote: post #39

Seems kind of concerning that using this at all means you send your image to Apple’s PCC machines.

Edit^2: On triple reread it sounds like the first pass ("Image Capture") sends the image metadata hash to be timestamped, whereas the second pass (Reference Image Development) sends the image itself but is not what actually creates the timestamp attestation. According to Apple[0][1] it sounds like the second pass (development) only happens when the reference image is actually viewed, which means that your image isn't sent if you never view the reference image?

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-reference-images...

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/reference-image/

> When you take a photo in Reference mode after tapping Reference Mode, your device will include reference image information in the photo’s metadata. If you then view that photo and tap the Reference badge on your iOS device or click it on your Mac, the device will send the raw photograph, metadata about the photograph like the sensor’s signatures and the time frame in which the photo was captured, as well as the sensor’s unique hardware identifiers to Private Cloud Compute.

Edit: On reread it seems they do in fact send the actual photographic data to PCC, which I presume has some reason over signing metadata on-device? Original mistaken post is below for transparency.

You can always not use the reference image mode, and according to the article you send a hash of the signature of the photograph, so all they would know is you took a photograph in reference image mode at some point in time before the request.

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

#53

Post by somethinsfishy »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #19
gruez wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you need a big enough screen to cover the entire field of view at 16 ft? Sounds expensive

Well, first, that's only expensive if you're poor. The world is absolutely full of people who can easily piss away your entire annual income throwing a house party. But I really mean that if the lidar barely works outdoors anyway then actually you don't need to be 16 feet away at all. Anyway, one may presume that they've thought about this.

Put some sugar on it. Please.

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

#54

Post by 0xWTF »

Hot damn. I've described this concept before, obviously not to this level of detail, but leaving this comment in here in case I can find my old comments. A bunch of people have poo-poo'd my proposals, but glad to see a serious actor really executing it. Probably no one at Apple ever read my posts, but it sure does feel good to see something executed. Hopefully it sticks.

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

#55

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

somethinsfishy wrote: post #53
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, that's only expensive if you're poor. The world is absolutely full of people who can easily piss away your entire annual income throwing a house party. But I really mean that if the lidar barely works outdoors anyway then actually you don't need to be 16 feet away at all. Anyway, one may presume that they've thought about this.

Put some sugar on it. Please.

Def Leppard, is that you?

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

#56

Post by baxtr »

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…

This sounds like it could be done, but the costs for doing so are comparably high.

I think the idea is to control the easy, cheap mass production of AI gen picture and not 100% coverage.

That’s a tradeoff I can live with.

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

#58

Post by scorpiosdayoff »

srik wrote: post #32
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's less about proving a photo's truth than about attesting it.

[dead]

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

#59

Post by porkshoe »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #34
spiderice wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so stupid. This makes it like, a thousand times harder to fake a photo than it would otherwise be. You pedants imagining a way to fake it doesn't change that.

> This makes it like, a thousand times harder to fake a photo than it would otherwise be. The problem with this thinking is twofold: 1) Whether it actually meaningfully increases the difficulty of a forgery remains to be seen. Despite their initial language about discerning real events, we see no details here about what scene information is used. 2) It increases the potential value of a forgery because now your forge…

You worry that a technology that you have never used nor evaluated might not work in practice...

Therefore because of your worry (which is based on remarkably little information), it's a bad technology?

Come the fuck on. That's beyond luddite bullshit.

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

#60

Post by dylan604 »

tristanj wrote: post #14
pveierland wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claim 7 in this patent application describes how depth sensors are used as part of an image authentication process, which would make such a workaround more difficult: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa... The Apple Reference Image feature is here launched on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that both have built-in LiDAR sensors that could be used for this process.

Apple's current implementation doesn't integrate LiDAR. And LiDAR wouldn't be enough here, it's trivial to block the projector and hide the dot pattern. No dot pattern = iPhone thinks the object is far away, which is what happens in landscape photos. A better fix is to take photos with all three iPhone cameras simultaneously, ideally as a 2-3s video, and use the parallax/multiple perspectives to extract depth informa…

> it's trivial to block the projector and hide the dot pattern. No dot pattern = iPhone thinks the object is far away, which is what happens in landscape photos.

I've never looked at the LiDAR hardware, but where is the emitter in relation to the receiver. Why would the LiDAR not reflect off of whatever you're blocking it with and return a very short flight meaning it was very close?

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