How can a camera have access to the signing key and prevent an attacker gaining access to that key?
Also, this would give camera companies (and any entity with leverage over the camera company, including their government) the power to decide what images are ‘true’ in the public’s eye. Companies that control the keys would need to be good at securing the keys.
In a similar way to the way DRM works in stuff like consoles today. And I’m not sure I follow the second problem here. Anybody could create this type of system going forward. But you have to produce hardware to take a picture in the first place, so obviously hardware manufacturers would be the ones to apply this process. The key simply links a photo back to a manufacturer. It doesn’t give companies monopoly on anything.
This concept describes a hardware anchored proof system for proving the originality of and the precise sensor origin of photographic media. The camera hardware would use a combination of secure enclaves and asymmetric cryptography like RSA to digitally sign images at the moment of capture making it possible to verify the physical origin of the file. The camera manufacturer could operate a Certificate Authority where users can validate the embedded signature against the registered public key of the specific device. This architecture would allow verifying that an image is an actual sensor derived photograph.
The neat part here is that the algorithm survives retouching of the photo, so you can still do typical things like cleaning up contrast, color balance, etc., without destroying the authenticity of the image. Given how good generated images are getting, it seems to me that deepfake detection approach is dead in the water, and something like this would establish a proactive foundation for cryptographic provenance of real photographs.
This seemed like the inevitable next step in digital media recording devices as generative tools get more advanced.
The neat part here is that the algorithm survives retouching of the photo, so you can still do typical things like cleaning up contrast, color balance, etc., without destroying the authenticity of the image.
This is an interesting feature. Hopefully it is not a potential attack surface for spoofing.
The verification aspect seems like a potential privacy disaster, but as long as there are extensive user controls it hopefully won’t be unavoidable.
I could see this being an optional feature you set before the act of recording. The lack of ‘verified’ media might represent a form of digital divide over time though, especially in the legal sphere.
Yeah, I’m thinking this will be mostly useful in the context of stuff like news reporting. If you’re a professional photographer, it would be very useful to be able to prove that you took a photo and that it is genuine.
Wouldn’t this suffer from the same ‘analog hole’ as DRM? i.e. just take a photo of whatever image you want to be verified?
You’d need a pretty high resolution source image plotted for that to work well, modern digital cameras have 20+ megapixels, and if you take a picture of a low resolution image it’ll be very obvious. I’m sure it’s possible, but definitely not that easy to do.
