Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

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 this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

Edit: And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case, the insurance/ID verification use cases are perfectly fine with anything that raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort. 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.

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 monitor. Paint the inside of the box using Vantablack (stopping reflections) and cover the LiDAR projector with tape.

I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.

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 companies and governments don't start forcing us to use this stuff by requiring it for their services.

The fundamental issue isn't technical. It's that people will see the "certified real" tag and just take the image for face value of whatever narrative someone wants to convey. They'll see the "Real Photo, Verified by Apple" and their brain will short circuit [0]

I don't think we should have this, for that reason alone (but many others too).

[0]: https://imgur.com/fVPkpuQ

To me the weakest spot of this whole endeavor is how this will create false confidence in a story just because the accompanying images pass Apple's verification.

Like with the Watch Ultra (attacking the diving-watch market with the sheer volume-scale of selling the development to everyone buying a Watch Ultra), Apple is attacking the trusted-imaging market with the same strategy.

Okay, fine. Will work for sure, this will disrupt the trusted-imaging market and moreover make Apple a service-provider in this industry (with the ramp-up cost paid by customers buying iPhones for entirely different purposes).

But creating this impression and media-buzz that Apple is now verifying more than just the digital authenticity of an image may shift the public scrutiny of MANY media/online statements:

There is a risk that random claims (and propaganda) will be given more credibility in the public eye just because they came with images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"

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 fundamental problem that defeated C2PA.

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.

I‘ve been wondering whether the contact tracking features introduced for Covid 19 could be used to verify that pictures of an event where taken by people who were actually around the scene. That way you‘d have some reassurance that a given picture was actually from the event. Combined with pictures from different angles from different people and some kind of verified photography should make alterations harder.

And why does someone have to trust Apple? Everything "security"-related that comes out of Apple lately somehow always assumes that Apple is to be unquestionably trusted.

And, yeah, I'm incredibly tired of this whole concept of a device you own acting in someone else's interests. This needs to stop and it needs to happen 10 years ago.

> 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 cameras unverified? Just like how Linux machines can't watch Netflix in 4K

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

1. Generate fake photo

2. Take a photo of it with iPhone

3. Apple's fancy reference image thing now says "omg it's real you guys"

I wonder why they went for ECDSA and RSA and how a freshly initialised sensor obtains enough randomness to create an unrecoverable private key. Other than that the overall protocol looks very interesting.

I think this is really good and kudos to Apple for implementing it. The first question that popped into my mind was "what new scenarios of government X forcing Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'individual' this enables?", but I can't think of anything. It seems that all government attack vectors this feature enables are of the type "government X forces Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'Apple'", i.e. a government can try to force Apple into certifying a narrative, and of course Apple is going to fight tooth and nail the lack of credibility that would result from that.

The timestamp system seems like it provides more benefit than signing the image data itself, at least in terms of difficulty to fake. As long as rolling back the stored timestamp token is prevented, I would have to find a phone that never updated its timestamp after the time I want to fake. Of course you could potentially find a phone that last connected to Apple's servers with a plausible timestamp. Even then the upper bound of when it signs the photo after reconnecting to the internet will raise eyebrows if you take too long to find the phone and fake the photo, so it effectively raises the bar to having to take the fake photo roughly simultaneously with the time the event purportedly took place anyway.

I already can see this to be used in an effort to force everyone to use smartphones with proprietary corporate spyware.

A photograph by itself should never be considered proof of anything.

Seems to lead us down the slippery slope of requiring an Apple device, or a Google device (e.g., https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requi...), or the device of some other entity (that may be mostly non-aligned with democratic values) in order to participate in society.

The unfortunate result of AI slop is reduced trust, which in turn is responded to with surveillance, which ultimately leads to the loss of liberty. Is it possible to do these sorts of verifications in an open way? I kinda doubt it, since someone has to control the hardware manufacturing process.

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.

I feel like for verified photography to be useful, it really needs a depth sensor so you can tell the difference between an actual scene and a photo of a photo. Granted, you could 3d print a scene from a photo, but at least for now it should be pretty obvious to tell the difference.

> or via software-level jailbreak of the device.

I’m surprised that even Apple calls jailbreaking, jailbreaking. Doesn’t that imply their own software is a jail?

Somewhat tangential but is "most secure consumer mobile device" actually correct? Does an iPhone beat out a grapheneOS android, or would that not be considered consumer because of aftermarket changes? Seems like a pretty bold claim but I know apple is pretty damn good with security (as long as you dont count Apple as a security risk themselves)

As sexy as apple can be: the blog post just shows how unsexy security is for apple.

I’m fine with such technology so long as the courts don’t treat “verified” images as truth.

I skimmed the whole article and I didn’t see a single image so I’m confused. Is there some watermark of some kind or where is this metadata integrated? Because if it’s just metadata then I need to parse each photo I come across manually, and if it’s a watermark it can be faked because I won’t manually validate every single image I come across to prove the watermark isn’t fake.

Hey I predicted this awhile ago. Although it is kind of an obvious solution so I can’t claim much insight hehe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135416

they said the same thing about synth id didnt they? waiting for someone to reverse engineer this too lol. the future will include a lot of time spent trying to figure out what is real. and that may be good cause to truly enjoy something real, one will have to go out and stop being indoors.

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.

When is this turned into an RFC?

"iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

So the iPhone Duo won't have it?

Apple has to allownpost-manufacruring exchanges of camera due ton right of repair legislation. This requires them to publish pairing tools that are to be used during the repair process to update all the cryptographic vérification chains in the device.

Now the camera module is supposed to generate a key pair internationally and send the public key over the bus. This looks like it is interceptable at repair time and a man in the middle can insert a different public key that they generated externally. Is there a way to stop this?

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.

85 comments, 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649222

At this point it'd be easier to return to film.

What if someone take the photo of the forged photo displayed on another device, doesn’t the forged photo become an authentic one?

The power of marketing.

EU wants Apple to implement digital fingerprinting to fight CSAM: overreach of power, total invigilation, nonono! Apple cannot comply! What about our privacy!

Apple implements the feature and sells it nicely wrapped in a PR material: oh, that's cool, innovative!

It only works in one of the 3 lenses though.

I feel a little discomfort about this: moving towards a world where photos were plausibly deniable felt good for privacy, this feels like a step further away.

More sales to Apple, to prove that your image is real.

Hardware wins.

Lots of criticism here but I think this is extremely promising. When this tech is extended to videos and perhaps even other forms of media, I think it has the potential of stopping all slop!

[dead]

NFTs by another name...

terrible idea...

but im sure it will popular with 60 year olds watermarking their pictures of sunsets.

Waiting for "Apple verified" photo of some important politician doing something wildly inappropriate.

Scrapped in 3..2..1..

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.