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".<p>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).<p>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 <i>perfectly fine</i> 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.
> 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".<p>You have it all wrong.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case<p>This is incorrect:<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
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.<p>> 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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>
> You have it all wrong.<p>> Apple Reference Image is not an id system<p>GP does not have it all wrong. A company desiring you to prove your identity often asks for a photograph of your government ID. Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a <i>verifiably</i> authentic photograph of your government ID.<p>That the Apple Reference Image itself is not traceable to the device/user is beside the point in this use case.
> 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.<p>> 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.<p>Some banking apps nowadays ask you to upload a photo of your ID and then use the webcam/selfie camera to confirm that's it's really you (sometimes asking you to move your head in a particular way). But how trustworthy is that process really? Apple Reference Image could be (part of) a solution, by certifying that both images were taken by the same device around the same time.
> 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<p>You think that this <i>won't</i> be used as additional data by the various competing companies who have implemented "take a live still or video selfie of yourself with your phone and show us your ID cards" for identity verification purposes?
> it's also not possible to determine if a pair of images came from the same device.<p>It’s possible for Apple, as stated in the blog post (e.g. “which lets the device later produce signatures that Apple can attribute to that specific phone”).
> So… a nation-state can't really do anything here unless they acquire alien technology.<p>At least for the image itself, using direct projection onto the sensor (in a way similar to a retinal projector or film recorder) would be difficult to detect I imagine?
You'll still need an iPhone, the verification is linked to the specific iPhone, and the specific iPhone is linked to you.
> <i>You'll still need an iPhone, the verification is linked to the specific iPhone, and the specific iPhone is linked to you.</i><p>Unless you use a friend's iPhone, or an iPhone you 'rented' for 5 minutes for $20 from someone on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace to take a picture on and then Airdrop to you.
If they airdrop it to you that typically requires you to have an iphone or a mac and airdrop users are able to be identified and tracked so the photo could still be linked to your device. The EU forced apple to use Wi-Fi Aware though, so unless that's similarly vulnerable people in the EU might be able to avoid those issues.
Buying a new overpriced phone every time you want to take a picture is certainly a decision.
><i>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.</i><p>Apple knows the iphone the reference image was uploaded from, so, yes, there is.
It doesn't, as it is run through an Oblivious HTTP relay run by a third party before getting to Apple's servers. So it has no IP information, and the requests use anonymous access tokens.<p>It is probably possible for an entity to break it, but it would require live access to both Apple and the third party (Likely Cloudflare) servers. And that is assuming there is only one third party routing OHTTP requests, otherwise you would need to monitor all of them, in real time, since the requests are transient.
Apple gets the device-signed image and replaces with a PCC signature to preserve anonymity.<p>> The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC.<p>So, if compelled, Apple could theoretically tell someone if two images came from the same camera.
Looks like you saw the word ID and went off. OP never called it an ID system
EMPs are not "alien technology", and you don't need to be a nation state either. That said, Apple's hardware security is generally very good.
Nation states almost certainly have the ability to extract the private keys out of an image sensor and SEP. Outside of superpowers even if you're willing to do it destructively.<p>They can then sign their own fraudulent images.
<< Apple Reference Image is not an id system;<p>I think you have a point. I would only note that just because it is not explicitly designed as one, does not mean it will not be effectively utilized in that manner.
I can tell its 'shopped because of the pixels
The described scheme links the image to the device's signing key<p>> 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.<p>How would they do that ? There is only one signed key of the device
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I think the biggest downside here is we're moving toward a world in which only Apple and Google and a few other privileged manufacturers can make cameras.<p>Related: It is also moving toward a world where the US effectively becomes the world judge of truth
I don't understand the vector of this:<p>An insurance would either assign #1 an insurance agent or mechanic to initially assess the damage (trusted) or #2 ask the customer to send pictures (untrusted).<p>Tendency is #2 for cost-saving of the insurance, and 3rd party apps are used to execute this.<p>Now the idea is that the insurance company discontinues the App and the (untrusted) customer must have an iPhone 18 Pro to make an insurance claim?<p>Or is the insurance agent / mechanic an untrusted entity who will now be required to have an iPhone 18 Pro?<p>What is the fraud vector here, and how can the insurance service provider continue cost-saving on damage-assessment by offloading to the customer, if the customer is required to own a specific device?
> Now the idea is that the insurance company discontinues the App and the (untrusted) customer must have an iPhone 18 Pro to make an insurance claim?<p>In a couple of years it will be almost any iPhone instead of 18 Pro. And if it catches on, other phone vendors will provide a similar service.
So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?<p>And then stop the 3rd party app which is vendor-agnostic and works on all devices?<p>I'd say that's unlikely.<p>IF that's an industry this Apple-feature will disrupt, it seems it will barely have an impact on the process of insurance companies themselves, but will actually disrupt the service-provider industry FOR insurances:<p>The insurance won't be able to stop their existing 3rd party cost-saving, as it provides the largest device-coverage for offloading to the customer.<p>Instead, either the insurance or the 3rd party service-provider will have to pay Apple <i>in addition</i> to make use of this feature, with the hopes that the provided data will reduce fraud.<p>Which brings me back to my actual question: What is the fraud-vector here?
> So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?<p>The industry has some extensive experience in independently verifying signatures, I don't see how the manufacturers factor in here. And for app features, just ask banks how integrating biometrics, payment services, etc. goes. Tends to be preferred, once Apple and Google Pay became fully available here in Austria, banks dropped their own NFC payment solutions in rapid succession.
Me neither, so your reply should be on the parent, because it states <i>"And if it catches on, other phone vendors will provide a similar service."</i>
>So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?<p>There would be no contract, you just upload image from your phone and they verify signature in the file
Some banks needs photos of machine readable IDs to verify user details to fight fraud. These IDs can be passports or NFC enabled EU (and compatible) ID cards.<p>This will allow banks to trust these cameras more on the long run, allowing higher security ID checks.
ID document verification via NFC can't by itself replace also biometrically verifying the person purporting to be the one that the document belongs to.<p>Without it, anyone with a stolen document can pass it. (I don't think there's a generally available database of stolen documents, so I suspect these usually remain valid until their regular date of epxiry.)
Okay, this doesn't answer the question on the vector but is another interesting example. Let's expand on that one then:<p>Banks are offloading the trusted process of ID verification to an untrusted entity (end-user, merchant,...) and compensate for the loss of security by using a trusted service-provider (now Apple AND an iPhone 18 Pro).<p>This is already happening today in two scenarios:<p>1. lower-risk scenarios (remotely) with trusted 3rd party service-providers and very low Hardware-requirements ("use this app on your phone to take a picture/video") and<p>2. higher-risk scenarios (on-site) with trusted 3rd party service-providers ("use THIS expensive device to take a picture/video of the customer/citizen")<p>Apple now potentially disrupts the service-provider industry of #2 (higher-risk scenarios) by<p>#a grabbing a part of this hardware/service market that MAY allow the end-user to be in control of the device and<p>#b replacing the on-site hardware/service with an iPhone "in a box".<p>They can't disrupt #1 because their cost-saving can't mandate the end-user to buy a 1000+ USD device just for THEM to provide the contracted service. (They can add convenience if you have it, but they can't reject their service if you don't)<p>Which means they disrupt mainly #2: The industry providing trusted imaging solutions for higher-risk scenarios.<p>--> So it's the Watch Ultra game all over again.<p>On Watch Ultra they disrupted the diving-watch market by the sheer scale of selling their development to everyone buying a Watch Ultra, driving down the cost so much that they can undercut every diving-watch company on the market.<p>Now they use the sheer scale of iPhone 18 Pro sales to enter the trusted-imaging market-segment, undercutting every player there and take that market.
Don't forget law enforcement, customs or any high(ish) stakes sector which needs to be able to trust the images they show as evidence as well.<p>Back in the day Canon and Nikon tried this with embedded private keys on their cameras, and with Sandisk's WORM SD cards. Then, somebody extracted the keys and it was game over.<p>While my iPhone 17 can't match a full frame mirrorless camera, it can take pretty impressive photos, so they are already more than adequate in detail and clarity department. So making these images trusted is a huge win for them.
I don’t understand what this brings to the table beyond what we’re currently doing.<p>Insurance companies can have a native app and require the device’s camera. Companies already have tools to combat a liveliness check. Even if you’re using a modified app that pulls from the photo album instead of the camera? A video recording with the appropriate liveness verification easily avoids that mess.
As per opening paragraph of link, AI fakes are a thing.<p>It's been possible to do a live video deepfake for a long time now, but as with all new tech, law and society are taking their sweet time to understand the risks; IMO this is the other side of the same coin as some infamous tech comments on consumer products: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224</a> and <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rob_Malda" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rob_Malda</a><p>NVIDIA suggested AI fakes controlled with face tracking input as a compression technique just for reducing video call bandwidth requirements (to ~117 bytes per frame). They did that six years ago: <a href="https://www.dpreview.com/news/5756257699/nvidia-research-develops-a-neural-network-to-replace-traditional-video-compression/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dpreview.com/news/5756257699/nvidia-research-dev...</a><p>As we're now in an AI race, even NVIDIA's specific technique has flaws which all the current tools can detect, there's never any guarantee of this continuing to be the case.<p>That said, in the case of Apple, they're historically followers not leaders despite the public image they like to present about innovation, and I'd expect this method to be flawed from day one even if we weren't reading a corporate blog post written in a self-congratulatory tone I find almost as off-putting as when AI write.
You don’t even need an AI deepfake to edit a video.<p>AI deepfake or edit video doesn’t pass liveliness checks without all the c2pa or reference image song and pony show.<p>Insurance companies can monitor the light reflections from the flash that they control or monitor the accelerometer and compare the accelerometer values with the video that they receive.<p>They could also just update their app to stop accepting photos from the album.
> That said, in the case of Apple, they're historically followers not leaders despite the public image they like to present about innovation<p>While its true Apple usually isn't the first in a product category--not the first mp3 player, not the first smartphone, not the first tablet) but once they get there, they're quite innovative.<p>When the iPhone 5s was released in 2013, it was the first smartphone with a 64-bit processor, which caught Qualcomm off guard. Even when Qualcomm released a 64-bit processor the following year, it kinda didn’t matter because Android was still 32-bit.
Twitter now flashes your screen different colors while watching the camera pointed at your face when you sign up, you know, to "make sure you're a real person"
> […] 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".<p>Why do you believe Android manufacturers and SOC makers like Qualcomm won’t be able to offer a similar solution?
Not the OP, but yes, other vendors will be able to support that as well. But a camera sensor that has<p>1. a public/private key exchanged during device-production (production-cost),<p>2. the capability to reboot in a cryptographic mode (R&D / component cost) and<p>3. a cloud-service which then processes the raw data to create a JPG (operational cost)<p>comes at a premium. Why should this premium be applied on a 99 USD Smartphone?<p>Which is my whole puzzle on this vector: If the big benefit is for insurance/ID-verification, which apply cost-saving by offloading their process to the untrusted customer, how much they can offload this by requiring their customer to own a 1000+ USD smartphone to provide THEIR service...?<p>The most I can imagine is insurances offloading their work to OTHER companies, NOT trusting them and therefore requiring them to own a 1000+ USD Smartphone. But even then, why not use a third party app that also runs on a 3y old iPhone and a 99 USD Android device...?
We have 99USD smartphones with 1080p+ AMOLEDs, massive 5k amp batteries and very performant SOCs (e.g. Galaxy A16) among other costly, but not vital niceties. I struggle to see how cost could be a factor here.
> I struggle to see how cost could be a factor here.<p>Okay. In good faith, I'll go with you:<p>If COST is not a factor, why does the Galaxy A16 still have no OIS (Optical Image Stabilization)?<p>Unlike this trusted-imaging service, OIS would be a feature for increased user-experience which is highly-matured and exists in Smartphones since 2013.<p>The answer is COST: A camera-module with OIS is a more-expensive component than a module without it.<p>And that's ONLY the component-cost: A OIS-camera doesn't come with increased cost in device-production (it's just another component to place and assemble), no increased cost in R&D (the tech is very mature, all the SW is there) and no running costs (there are no cloud-services required to operate OIS)
Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly half and thus take some significant engineering and design cost to accommodate? At least it seems that way in the phones I've taken apart and looked at.<p>Also, OIS is a major mechanical add on (a literal motor) and even 1500usd smartphones lack it on some of their sensors, mainly because while it can have an advantage on an ultrawide, that tends to be more limited. Incidentally, most 99usd phones have one (actually usable) sensor which thus tends to have a larger width to compensate. I hope, in good faith, you see the difference, to something like ARI.<p>AMOLED, etc. are also a bit more expensive then OIS, but we get those into a sub 100usd BOM easily somehow. More so for 5g, certain features just become expected/required.<p>Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the high-end but quickly became required and essentially free to implement.<p>Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.<p>To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why do most new smartphone at 99usd include some form of an NPU? Or the trusted modules for biometrics, etc.?
><i>Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly half</i><p>No, you can apply smartphone OIS-tech on any sensor, stabilization is achieved via the lens-array, not the sensor. The size of the module slightly increases but that's not a hindering factor. Cost/Benefit of OIS on ultra-wide lenses is not there, so it's usually not applied.<p>><i>Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the highend but quickly became required for one and basically free to implement for two.</i><p>TEE became a mandatory requirement of the media industry for Smartphones in ~2010, as they announced plans to restrict media-playback on a device without measures to secure the DRM-keys. Google made it mandatory shortly after, because the entire ecosystem was built on media-consumption.<p>It didn't come for free to the players in the industry, it became a very expensive task to develop, support and maintain it, but that's another story.<p>Drawing a parallel here, I fail to see who should require cryptographic authentication of a taken image from end-user devices, to the point that no consumer devices without it will be built anymore.<p>><i>Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.</i><p>It will be supported in sensors for sure, but those will be premium-tier sensors, as a differentiation factor. Until today there was no premium sensor used in mass-tier devices.<p>Of course, again, if there is demand in the market or a regulation requiring it, it will create an incentive for the industry to follow, but I fail to see why either of this should happen in the coming years.<p>><i>To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why can you not buy a single new smartphone at any price without some NPU?</i><p>I don't know why OIS is not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, can you elaborate?<p>As stated, it's a highly mature technology available for over a decade already, providing critical-mass observable end-user value, yet it didn't just naturally "trickle down" to every smartphone price-segment, simply because it comes with additional cost no matter which scale (and the Galaxy A1x tier has <i>massive</i> scale).<p>A NPU is just the evolution of a DSP, which exists in Smartphone SoC's for more than a decade now and is required for Audio and Image processing. DSP's used to run pre-calculated inference models for lens-correction, exposure, white-balance, etc., now these processes can run as models on an NPU.<p>---<p>You are trying to argue why that feature won't naturally become a commodity at basically no cost. I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.<p>The market doesn't get features as a default "easily somehow", features reach this commodity stage because of significant end-user demand (like Camera, Display, Battery), business-value (for the vendor, like Apple Pay) or industry-requirements (like TEE, Widevine example above).<p>I don't see this happen for this feature, because there is<p>1. no significant end-user value (unless the public narrative is massively skewed towards "everything is true when the image was signed"),<p>2. the business-value applies only for Apple's service-proposition for now (which will likely make this feature expand to the non-Pro iPhone tier), and for<p>3. the industry-requirement I don't see WHO would actually be able to enforce this, for WHICH actual benefit.
> I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.<p>And despite that experience, you do not see the universal value in reliable, verifiable image attestation for any user? You cannot imagine why that may not just be very useful, but quickly become required, what the "end-user demand", "business-value" or "industry-requirements" could be?
This is not what I wrote and a very bad-faith statement of yours.<p>There is universal value in many features, yet they didn't become a commodity in all smartphone-tiers.<p>I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones, which you keep insisting on without apparently comprehending the industry and market aspects I am trying to explain.<p>Peace.
What? Those three sentences are not really compatible with each other?! Like, they are mutually exclusive and each appears to hold a different position.<p>How is what I wrote (that you seem to not see universal benefit) in bad-faith/not what you wrote (honestly trying to understand what you mean) if you then add:<p>> I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones [...]<p>So, do you see universal value or not? Cause you again said you do not and that was precisely what I wrote, that you do not seem to despite it being obvious to anyone who thinks about why phones of any price have cameras.<p>Should I honestly start writing a list why private as well as business users of smartphones may want, even need this? Is that really required? Consider every use case of a camera on a phone, please, before I feel the need to do that.
You fail to understand the difference between a feature having perceived "universal value" and that same feature being applied universally in all price-segments of a device. These are, and I cannot overemphasize this, two different things!<p>You stated that you <i>"struggle to see how cost could be a factor here"</i>, so in good faith I was trying to give you an insight.<p>There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.<p>So you wanted to shift the conversation, claiming that it's not a <i>"serious, honest and accurate"</i> comparison, without providing any reasons for that.<p>Again, I walk with you, I respond to what you're stating.<p>Now it ends with you starting the straw-man argument of how obviously great this feature is and asking how despite all experience I am not capable to see that.<p>See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.<p>You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith. That's why our talk ends here. I give you my side of this conversation so you may read and grow from it, but this is entirely up to you.<p>P.S.: You also seem to misunderstand what this feature is. It's NOT picture attestation as you put it.<p>Picture attestation means an entity confirms the connection of a picture to something else (some "metadata"), e.g. a picture of a person to an identity (Name, ID,...) or a place. This attestation party can either be a person (self-attested) or an official entity (e.g. a government).<p>Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.<p>But let's end this here. Have a good day.
><i>There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.</i><p>The reason is digital stabilization is a good enough alternative to not bother, and the lens/sensor modules they use in bulk just didn't come with "analog" stabilization. And OIS is way less important than a future digitally verified photos feature could be (which could be mandated by corporations, banks, governments, insurance companies, for several uses when it becomes widespread), so they didn't bother to add it.<p>All kinds of cheapo smartphones still manage to have OIS, just because some Samsung models don't doesn't mean it's a universal argument for cheap phones in general.<p>><i>Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.</i><p>Moot point, since the entity (e.g. gov) asking for an untampered photo (which this can do), can combine the photo with the metadata from the upload, like your gov mobile app account.
> See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.<p>> You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith [...]<p>What? This entire conversation started with the assumption being made that this was going to be iPhone exclusive. I stated doubt and then you (re-read to verify cause you seem to have forgotten that) out of left field and for no discernible reason felt the need to move the conversation to the only massive straw man in this interaction, the 99usd phone market.<p>I personally still believe that this is going to be a universal feature soon enough (wait to hear from Omnivision, etc.) and stand by that. This is my personal assessment due to the objective need for such features in the world we live in today. I may be wrong on this, we will see. Maybe it will be restricted to the higher end Android phones, but that would still be compatible with what I started out saying.<p>I shouldn't have engaged with someone so serious that they must drag "why couldn't Android OEMs in general do the same" (a purely technical question) down to "99 USD Smartphone" and "premium" on those (an odd and empty pivot). Anyone who does such a shift, well, they must have a well founded, serious point to make.
><i>If COST is not a factor, why does the Galaxy A16 still have no OIS (Optical Image Stabilization)?</i><p>Because it's just not that important, phones and cameras have also used digital stabilization via cropping since forever.
Those are two fundamentally different things:<p>1. OIS (optical stabilization) ensures that the light photons consistently hit the same pixel, removing the blur caused by camera-shake during exposure.<p>2. EIS (electrical stabilization) via cropping compensates camera-shake on video(!) recording by applying the same shake to the crop-canvas within the frame.<p>--> EIS can fix a shaky video but not a blurry photo.
It's 2026, with cleaner high ISOs even in phone sized sensors giving the ability to raise the shutter speed as needed, we hadn't had much of an issue with blurry photos for a decade now, with or without OIS. There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2).<p>It's video where people care about these days. Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?
Might be boring, but in 2026 "clean high ISOs" in phone-sized sensors mainly comes from image post-processing (stuff like multi-frame merging is done even when shooting "RAW"). Post-processing requires a stable (albeit noisy) image, otherwise it'll be garbage-in/garbage-out.<p>--> OIS actually became MORE important for Smartphones in the past years, because while post-processing produces better and better results, it massively depends on usable input data. OIS is one of the very few methods to improve the INPUT-quality for post-processing.<p>><i>"There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2)."</i><p>That's a apples and oranges comparison. A quick Google search tells me the size of a pixel on the Ricoh GR sensor is 4.81 µm, which is ~8 times larger than the pixel in recent smartphones (~0,6µm). It is not only physically capable to capture 8x more light, it is also much less affected by minor shaking than sensors with smaller pixel-sizes.<p>>*"Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?"<p>Not sure what's a "S12", but:<p>- On flagship phones with OIS: Not so much. Maybe in low-light scenarios, because, you know, not much light...<p>- On cheaper devices without OIS: Yes! Oh yes, constantly.<p>People assume that the picture-quality of a e.g. 2026 Galaxy A16 must be comparable or better than the picture of a 8-year old Galaxy S9. It's not, the S9 is still better in everyday shooting.<p>Just check user-reviews of mass-tier smartphones without OIS, like Samsung Galaxy A series...
How many smartphones have no camera? Zero? Bluetooth? Zero? But they could save cost by not having those. I think they are basically table stakes. If this type of thing becomes required for more and more things then no one will buy a phone that doesn't have them.
Yes, the whole insurance self-service is built on smartphones having a camera.<p>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.<p>Changing the topic to other features won't change that.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>For the other assumption, that <i>"If this type of thing becomes required"</i>, 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)
><i>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.</i><p>Them becoming 70% cryptographic is enough. The people who need the feature, can get a compatible model. Nobody argued that smartphones sold for kids to game on for example should have it.
Well, that's kind of like DRM and Widevine, which exists on every consumer device.
Well, that happened because in ~2011 the entire media industry announced that they will stop media playback on devices which didn't secure the DRM-keys.
As media consumption was fundamental to the Smartphone ecosystem, Google made secure-boot and widevine mandatory.<p>Sure, the same could happen here, but I don't know which industry (or other body) would demand that <i>and</i> have sufficient justification for it.<p>After all, the feature doesn't really change that much for a consumer, the trust-chain is largely unchanged: If I send you a picture and tell you that's my dog, you still have to take my word for it, regardless whether Apple signed the picture or not.
> comes at a premium. Why should this premium be applied on a 99 USD Smartphone?<p>It's entirely software. It's R&D cost, with basically none of it in hardware (you technically just need the private key store which even very cheap devices have)
A bunch of them already offer one. Have been a while, actually; the S25 and Pixel 10 came with exactly this.<p>The timestamping server is the hard part, especially with the verified compute component. It's just not something I see Samsung doing.<p>I expect Google to show up with a blog post titled "extending C2PA with timestamps for industry-leading authenticity confirmation" any time.
The main way we combat insurance fraud is by throwing people in jail who do it. I dont think AI faked photos is a major cause of fraud.
Insurance agencies worried about fraud could just do what they did prior to smartphones: have you bring the car to a claims adjuster at your local office. I’ve brought cars to be inspected, because I got T-boned at an intersection by a careless driver before smartphones existed; it was reasonably quick and hassle-free.
The one issue I have it that it lets Apple determine if two reference images were taken by he same defice. In particular if one of the images is of an ID, or otherwise contains identifying information, that is a privacy downside, and authorities can subpoena Apple to check for and reveal this connection between multiple images.
> looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI<p>I don't follow. It's my user agent that's verifying the image, and my device will tell me that it's not verified.
I think you’re on the ball, but also all KYC flows, photo proof for shipping returns (Chinese platforms were getting destroyed on this) etc. etc. It’s a very very clever solution and a very opportune time.
Yrs; that is what world needs, complete dependency on one giga corporation... I cannot wait for it to happen!
> 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<p>This is definitely not an Apple thing, though the use profile is more ubiquitous. Canon had, more than twenty years ago, when they first started making DSLRs, the question of "If we want law enforcement to use these, how do we handle the inevitable questions?" and as a result built out the option to digitally sign the raw sensor data in-camera so the raw file could be pointed to in court with an attestation of image integrity.
Sadly, people will happily go with this crypto-lockdown until there's no personal computing whatsoever. Only way to fight is not to play, or hack this in some way.
> People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.<p>True.<p>> raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort.<p>Anyone can spoof this.<p>Apple cannot stop spam iMessages. They can't stop someone from rendering their privileged UI inside a browser viewport. People copy and paste remote script executions from convincing captchas.<p>This whole provenance thing is a red herring. You agree with me, but there's truly not a single application for this that won't be exploited.
Apple doesn't address the modified photo replay situation, where you take a picture of an already edited image.<p>Photoshop / AI-gen an image -> display on a high-resolution monitor -> photograph the monitor with iPhone 18 Pro -> valid Apple Reference image.<p>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.<p>I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.
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:<p><a href="https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/20260268025" rel="nofollow">https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...</a><p>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.<p>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 information. The video files (Possibly audio too) could also be included with the verified image as additional verification.<p>They can also prevent photos if iPhone detects the LiDAR sensor is covered, similar to how Meta does it with their camera glasses.
> 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.<p>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?
I think the plan is to block the emitter, not the emitter and the receiver together
Paint the stopper vantablack then.
I don't think it's an either or - additional data signals that need to correlate to authenticate will increase confidence. You can use multiple other signals to evaluate whether something is truly a landscape photo, and in that case not require a LiDAR capture, but if you are inside and at close range then you could assume that it should be part of scoring the authentication.<p>Similarly, LiDAR alone will help disqualify cases where someone is just taking a picture of e.g. a landscape target of the Golden Gate, but that it shown on a screen 1 meter away.
> all three iPhone cameras simultaneously, ideally as a 2-3s video, and use the parallax/multiple perspectives to extract depth information.<p>I think optics could be used to make each camera see a different image.<p>A video could show shake, which could be verified against readings from the phone's accelerometer -- but you could just hold it still and claim that it was on a tripod.
Right but I’d argue that realistically this feature is going to be most useful when taking photos of things reasonably close by, people especially, rather than landscape photography.
This approach makes me wonder if the future is actually going to move towards visual cryptography.
Um… that's already a thing [1]:<p><pre><code> TL;DR: What is C2PA in 60 seconds
What: An open technical standard for embedding cryptographically signed provenance data inside digital media files.
Who: Created by a coalition founded by Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic in February 2021.
How: A C2PA Manifest (also called a Content Credential) travels inside the file and records who made it, when, and what tools were used.
Why: Deepfake incidents surged from 500,000 to 8 million cases between 2023 and 2025. Provenance gives media a verifiable chain of custody.
</code></pre>
[1]: <a href="https://c2paviewer.com/articles/what-is-c2pa" rel="nofollow">https://c2paviewer.com/articles/what-is-c2pa</a>
iPhone lidar only works up to like 16 feet in the easiest lighting conditions (indoors) and may be functionally ineffective outdoors.
Still, that means that either the fake target scene and your screen presenting it would need to be outside of LiDAR sensor bounds, or you'd need to find a way to make the depth sensor data conform with your fake scene, both increasing the difficulty of producing a forgery.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49721878">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49721878</a><p>> <i>increasing the difficulty of producing a forgery</i><p>The problem with this thinking is twofold:<p>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.<p>2) It increases the potential value of a forgery because now your forgery is attested by Apple.<p>So it either makes it easier to defraud people or more worthwhile to put in the effort to defraud people or both. None of those outcomes are great.
A sufficiently light absorbing material is indistinguishable from infinity to a lidar. Or simply add a mirror that redirects it sideways, those can't be detected either.
So you need a big enough screen to cover the entire field of view at 16 ft? Sounds expensive
Or, probably just some optics, like a slanted $9 IR mirror [1] in front of it, to direct the lidar to the sky/absorption box. Then you can point at the high res HDR TV that's probably already in your living room.<p>[1] <a href="https://commonlands.com/products/ir-cut-filters-csp650?srsltid=AU7gw4X-pCzrQspQzH18g1_O281WPxL3N-zhy48Usxf-IMb8Ctbs45Bk" rel="nofollow">https://commonlands.com/products/ir-cut-filters-csp650?srslt...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
> <i>But maybe it’s better than nothing?</i><p>I think this will depend on how it gets used. I can imagine numerous outcomes where it's in fact worse than nothing (significantly more effective blackmail, for instance).
The problem is that if defeating it is trivial, then it _authenticates_ fake images.<p>The problem is that it makes it easier to fool people and provide "cryptographic" evidence of validity, backed by big tech.<p>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.
> 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.<p>Knowing Apple, they've been working on and testing Apple Reference Image for years.<p>It being perfect isn't the issue; it's that random people on the internet who are just learning about this assume Apple's engineers haven't already thought about everything (and more) mentioned in this thread.
> It being perfect isn't the issue; it's that random people on the internet who are just learning about this assume Apple's engineers haven't already thought about everything (and more) mentioned in this thread.<p>Given how many bugs there are in macOS and how long they have remained there, I (who have been writing iOS apps from the release of the first retina iPod touch until AI got good) functionally agree with such people; at best, I think Apple's engineers haven't actually <i>solved</i> everything (and more) mentioned in this thread, even if every one of these things may have come up in discussions and even reached an official backlog or task list or similar.
If they thought about it, then why isn't this <i>very obvious failure point</i> even mentioned in the technical breakdown?
> maybe it’s better than nothing?<p>While that is not quite my bar of confidence when implementing wide-reaching technologies that have numerous unexplored knock-on effects, I guess the calculus must have been different on Infinite Loop recently.
It's bad to begin with that Apple should be the arbiters of reality.
I like that seatbelt argument example.<p>I’ve seen that type of argument a million times, and I’ll certainly reuse that.
Put some sugar on it. Please.
furthermore, couldnt you do parallax from the multiple cameras as well as flicker the flash?<p>seems pretty easy to make it sufficiently difficult to trick the system
It also doesn't prevent you from staging an image or anything that's existed since photography was invented. But that's not the problem they're trying to solve.<p>> Today, powerful, widely available AI tools allow users to easily generate or alter photorealistic images to a degree that was difficult to imagine just a few years ago.<p>Photoshop has existed for decades and so has fake images. This is a low friction way to attest "this image came from an iPhone sensor and Apple approved it". It will still take the usual image forensics to determine if the scene it depicts is legitimate.
> <i>"But that's not the problem they're trying to solve."</i><p>It is the problem that they say they're trying to solve, though. They specifically say "where the essential role of a photograph is to prove that something actually happened".<p>It fails the reasonable person test to say that the "something" in that phrase refers to the act of taking the photo itself.<p>Likewise in "distinguish between photographs that depict real events and...".
Yes, it is proving something actually happened, that is your monitor screen showing something you photographed.
So, in your view, photography has been fatally flawed since the late 1800’s, and mere mitigation of AI image gen are insufficient if they don’t also solve actors impersonating real people?
No security control is perfect. The point is to increase costs to the point its unfeasible.<p>After all, if money is no object, you could just bribe every single apple employee involved in the project.
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.
> <i>This makes it like, a thousand times harder to fake a photo than it would otherwise be.</i><p>The problem with this thinking is twofold:<p>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.<p>2) It increases the potential value of a forgery because now your forgery is attested by Apple.<p>So it either makes it easier to defraud people or more worthwhile to put in the effort to defraud people or both. None of those outcomes are great.
> Whether it actually meaningfully increases the difficulty of a forgery remains to be seen.<p>Then maybe let’s save those criticisms until this is in the hands of knowledgeable people who can actually test? I mean, I’m no fan of the direction Apple has gone under Tim Cook, but all else being equal I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt that they may have thought this through over the time it took to build more than a random person speculating on HN who just read a blog post for the first time.<p>> (…) we see no details here about what scene information is used.<p>And you assume that everything in a post is the sum total of how it works?<p>> It increases the potential value of a forgery<p>By that token, should we also not be adding forgery deterrents to ID cards and bills? After all, if you can fake the preventive measures, “it increases the potential value of a forgery”.
You worry that a technology that you have never used nor evaluated might not work in practice...<p>Therefore because of your worry (which is based on remarkably little information), it's a bad technology?<p>Come the fuck on. That's beyond luddite bullshit.
> because of your worry (which is based on remarkably little information)<p>You must be new around here. ;-)
Is this you? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685271">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685271</a>
> This is a low friction way to attest "this image came from an iPhone sensor and Apple approved it".<p>Which surely will be useful in ID verification on the Internet; Android devices most likely will follow with same or similar solution
This has been possible since the beginning of photography and yet I can’t think of a single scenario where people have been tricked by a staged photo. Yet every day hundreds of millions of people are being fooled by AI generated photos.
Sony's analogous solution (<a href="https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/" rel="nofollow">https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/</a>) claims 3d depth information is built in, I'm sure Apple could do the same given at least some iPhone models have LiDAR on the back
This would work for close up shots taken on iPhone, but not landscape shots. The infrared dots the iPhone LiDAR projects are too weak to appear over long distances.<p>Also the dots can be trivially blocked by putting your finger over the sensor, sometimes improving photo quality. I do this frequently when I want to take a photo through a window. The absence of the dot matrix tells the iPhone to focus on the background far away instead of the windowpane.
I see, yeah good point. Perhaps the lack of reliable depth data also be baked into some signed metadata property. Wouldn't tell you definitively if something were fake, but could be a context clue if a particular photo were dubious I suppose.
> I do this frequently when I want to take a photo through a window.<p>I feel really dumb for not having thought of this.
> I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.<p>While I'm on board with you about the inabsolute security of this (relative to what's typically expected of cryptographic systems), the fact that their 'verified' state requires a live certification and can be revoked means that the sensor responsible for obviously faked images will see those images and that device no longer certified.<p>It all relies a lot on trust in Apple, and integration with Apple, and relatively unmotivated attackers.
This sounds like it could be done, but the costs for doing so are comparably high.<p>I think the idea is to control the easy, cheap mass production of AI gen picture and not 100% coverage.<p>That’s a tradeoff I can live with.
It's even easier than that. You just wait for someone else to figure out, some photography professional with fancy equipment and a hacker-y mindset, and you pay them to sign your photos for you.<p>Once a defeat device (a camera pointed at a screen) is functional, whoever has it, can simply automate a "receive API request, display image on screen, photograph it, return signed image" pipeline. A cheap internet service. I'd WAG a hundred thousand signatures per day per phone, limited by the sensor speed.<p>Since there's no way for anyone, <i>Apple included</i>, to correlate photo signatures with the device that signed them, it's also true there's no way to stop one device from signing millions in bulk. (<i>"...an outside observer cannot determine whether any pair of reference images were taken by the same device..."; "...avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor..."</i>)<p>It's the same economic asymmetry as DRM vs. movie piracy (as soon as one group defeats a technical challenge, millions instantly benefit, at zero marginal cost). Apple has no chance of winning.
> Paint the inside of the box using Vantablack<p>But you're only allowed to do that if your name if Anish Kapoor
Yeah, such systems have been tried (and been hacked) for decades now.<p><a href="https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html</a><p><a href="https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authentication-system-compromised/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...</a><p>You don't even have to travel to the location, you can just spoof GPS. And of course that will only be needed until some eastern european kid gets bored one weekend and the signing keys magically appear on pastebin.<p>It's funny to see Apple fall into this same trap.
To be fair Apple of all companies have the best shot at pulling it off. They've been perfecting their hardware security for years for other reasons and this is just another way to take advantage of that work. But yes, if someone breaks it then the trust is gone and it casts doubt on all of the photos that were ever captured using the broken system.
>I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.<p>There’s no such thing as a Golden Gate Bridge.<p>Prove it.
I think the timestamp attestation of the digital negative puts a real hamper on this, because it puts a bounded time window on the photo as part of the cryptographic chain of evidence.<p>So if you're the proud owner of "literally the only photo of a ridiculously unusual event in a highly public area" which is bounded to either a plausible 15-30 minute window or a sketchy March2026->Now window, people can do something like "hey, gee, did anyone else see that UFO over the golden gate bridge at 3pm?"<p>plus, you know, the confidence score from their secret neural network, which has an unknown scoring function.
It's less about proving a photo's truth than about attesting it.
I suspect they have ways to ID at least some things like this somehow in ways that will lead to key revocation.
Is this really that big of a flaw in this implementation? I don't think it's worth the additional complexity to address it. (Encoding depth information in some way, trying to detect "flat" surfaces, whatever).<p>Discerning a camera taken image of an image is typically very very easy. The collors/exposure/etc will all be obviously wrong in ways to a human, even without doing any analysis.
Won't the focus length of the camera be wrong?
Exactly, a wave of “verified” fake images are coming.
> take a picture of an already edited image<p>I think the "reference image" means a photo is taking by a real iPhone 18 device at a certain time, what the content actually means is another matter.<p>The "digital negative" in DNG format can be used to analyze the authenticity of the content.
Canon tried this 20 years ago with DSLRs. Nikon had an authentication system. Both were broken. The keys ended up on Pastebin. Apple's hardware security is better, but history suggests this is a temporary advantage. The real question is whether the system will be revoked when (not if) it's broken, and whether Apple will have the guts to retroactively invalidate millions of "verified' photos"
keys went public way after it was abandoned.<p>think for one second, who cares enough about image authenticity AND publishes raw photos directly from a camera with zero post production?<p>this was, is, and always will be useless and only serve the purpose it's fulfilling here: talk about the brand in a higher than thou privacy bastion.
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.<p>I hope that companies and governments don't start forcing us to use this stuff by requiring it for their services.
Uploading photos is probably why this thing is unavailable in EU. Or tis another case of their performative malicious compliance.
Because it’s impossible to implement this feature in open source and out in the open. It relies on a locked down image pipeline and hidden key.
That's also why the approach is fundamentally flawed. The open-ish C2PA protocol has been "defeated" by tricking phones into signing arbitrary data already. The even-more-closed Apple version can be defeated the same way <i>and</i> relies on Apple to be the sole arbiter of truth.
its impossible in closed source. there is no reason to believe it does what it says it does. only private keys in the chain need to remain secret.
Incorrect. There is nothing here requiring closed source. Only private keys need to be kept private for obvious reasons
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]<p>I don't think we should have this, for that reason alone (but many others too).<p>[0]: <a href="https://imgur.com/fVPkpuQ" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/fVPkpuQ</a>
I’m pretty sure “certified real” aren’t the words Apple will use, nor do they use it in this document. The words to describe the technology were chosen with care: semantic verification, attestation, tamper evident, etc.
But that’s not how the label will be interpreted in real life
You seem to be missing the point that’s being made here. Of course apple will word this very carefully. This does not matter in how people will interpret it. They will interpret it as certified real.
The average person already does this with obvious AI slop.
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.<p>Like with the Watch Ultra (attacking the diving-watch market with the sheer volume-scale of selling the development to <i>everyone</i> buying a Watch Ultra), Apple is attacking the trusted-imaging market with the same strategy.<p>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).<p>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:<p>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"
> images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"<p>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.
><i>No, because images will be confirmed to have been taken on "this iPhone".</i><p>Actually the description of Apple makes explicit statements AGAINST that:<p>Quote: <i>Privacy preservation: an outside observer cannot determine whether any pair of reference images were taken by the same device</i>
> an outside observer<p>An inside observer can tho, and if they know or have it, cant they be subpoenaed and forced to disclose the identity?<p>This sounds pretty bad for journalists/sources. Why is this needed now of all times?
And then every anonymous source gets revealed, and the government bombs then for the greater good.
That's a lot of words to say "we re-invented C2PA but made worse by getting our servers involved somehow".<p>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.
It looks like the reason for the custom timestamp setup is to assert and upper and lower bound on time. A normal timestamp server can asset it saw the image at a certain time but not that the image wasn’t created much earlier. This setup, the image processing pipeline can immediately attach the last seen timestamp to the photo as a lower bound, and then connect to the network to get the upper bound time.<p>If there is too much of a gap between the upper and lower bounds then the image becomes suspicious.
The lower bound is specified by the device, you don't need support from the timestamping server for that. Determining if this timestamp is or isn't suspicious can be done at verification time. The timestamping feature itself makes sense from a verification perspective (though the privacy implications are questionable, of course), but I don't think it necessitates an Apple-specific setup.<p>This approach does have one benefit, which is that Apple gets all the (meta)data to determine if something is or isn't "real", rather than letting the verifier decide beforehand.<p>I can only imagine the outrage if Google or Microsoft added a "upload all of your photos to us and we will mark them are real or fake" protocol, even with all of the verified compute gaff.
Doing that on modern iOS is unlikely. They’ve really locked it down in the past half decade.
I just finished reading a scifi book called Venemous Lumpsucker which had this type of system as a minor plot point. An interesting twist was that there were essentially smart-contract based non-disclosure agreements that could effectively disable attestation for photos and videos on a specific device that had consented to the NDA.
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.<p>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.
How do you plan to replace the sensor of your phone's main camera (with a device you need), and let it authenticated by the OS, and then create authenticated photographs with it?<p>Apple/iOS already have part authentication pipeline on its security sensitive devices (TouchID/FaceID). How can camera sensor can't be considered one of those and needs attestation before enabling?<p>From the document:<p>> Apple Reference Image leverages custom-designed image sensors in iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max to ensure reliable capture of image data, and relies on Private Cloud Compute, which provides a computational environment for secure photographic processing <i>that cannot be subverted even in the case of device compromise</i>. (emphasis mine)
Very much agreed.<p>I believe many of the problems we have, need social and human solutions, especially when the technical solutions are hard or impossible.<p>Like here, where we can no longer trust images to depict reality and act as proof. While its admirable that people look for technical solutions, the obvious social solution is to admit that images are no longer absolute proof and will become less and less trustworthy¹.<p>And, by admitting that, change our relation to these artifacts. Sure, that will change journalism, police work, legal systems, etc etc.<p>But pretending that we can rely on images might allow journalists, police, judges to continue relying on them as if they're authentic, which is a far bigger problem over a longer period.<p>Social solutions require effort, demand flexibility, take time and are messy. But this is what humans are and do. Not everything has a technical solution. Not every technical solution is the best option.<p>¹ we already saw this when people claimed "someone must have hacked my iphone and put it there". For decades we've seen this with images that are deliberately taken in a way to spin a story (like the illusion of a large crowd or spacious room through carefull angles or fancy lenses). And I predict we will see this with security footage, "live streams" or even bodycams with "ai enhancement". Just imagine a bodycam or a dashcam that manipulates the output to benefit the owner. "A dashcam that will prove your innocence in assumed traffic violations" or such.
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.
I’m fairly sure that the contact tracing feature has been removed now. And it wouldn’t be needed anyway, the iPhone location services are far more useful. I imagine the geotag could be included with the verification.<p>Location services is quite hard to trick. To the point people have gone to the lengths of putting iPhones inside a microwave for RF shielding and setting up fake phone tower signals inside to trick the phone in to unlocking the hearing aid feature on AirPods for unapproved countries.
Too much potential for revealing the identities of others there.
The functionality included time-based rotation of the identifier that supposedly at least notably increased the effort to identify/track people over a longer time frame. I never dug into the details, but I figure that works better with short-term contacts and may break if you are in contact with many people over a longer time frame.
Also, like contact tracking, it should be opt-in, so that you explicitly could act as ‚eyewitness‘.
> 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.<p>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
You'd need to jailbreak the camera sensor chip and the phone's secure element. Which isn't exactly impossible either, but it's harder. I don't think it has been done yet (but I'm sure it will be at some point).
It seems like the two signatures on device are processed on the camera sensor itself, and then post processing is signed by the SEP. Neither of these would be compromised even if you have a full jailbreak.
Yes.
I'm super excited for all the people saying "lol just point it at a genai photo" to make a blog post later about how they successfully subverted this approach and fooled people into believing their image was verified without detection as a fraudulent image. because that'll be a lot more interesting than a reflexive snarkpost about the first idea that came to mind to hypothetically defeat it.
My comment on this idea from 9 years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291641">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291641</a><p>First reply was exactly the same as most of the top-level comments here today: "That doesn’t prove anything. Make your fake video, point your phone camera at it, record."<p>Of course, I'm sure someone else had thought of something along these lines in the 90s, I just didn't have a citation to hand.
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.<p>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.
Seems kind of concerning that using this at all means you send your image to Apple’s PCC machines.
Presumably you would only do this for images you plan on sharing to social media anyways, to prove that it's not AI generated.<p>PCC is quite good, about as close to private remote compute we can get without doing HME.
If homomorphic encryption is not involved, how does Apple <i>not</i> have access to the raw image data being sent to PCC? (Genuine question)
It would be incorrect to presume that.
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?<p>[0] <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-reference-images-iphwvm89mgxhnqr/27/ios/27" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-reference-images...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/reference-image/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/reference-image/</a><p>> 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.<p>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.<p>You can always not use the reference image mode, and according to the article you send a <i>hash</i> 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.
> some reason over signing metadata on-device<p>After my brief read, one of the main reasons they’re using PCC to produce the signed JPEGs, instead of doing everything on device, is that it maintains your privacy.<p>If you were signing with the iPhone, an attacker could then correlate photos taken with the same device.<p>Apple certainly has the data that “this sensor, in this device, took this exact photo” in PCC at the time of signing, but they discard that data.
This is something I always had in my mind: sign at photo taken, at least you know it comes from a phone and it's not AI generated
Thinking aloud about failure modes / edge cases:<p>If i create a high quality deepfake image, project it on a large screen and take a photo of that image with an iPhone (+apple verified image secure tag) ... would that resulting image be considered "authentic" by default?<p>Would digital forensics accessible to lay people still be able to fact-check and call out misuse / fakery of the new secure tag.
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.
Though, on second thought, "government X could force Apple to disable feature for members of group Y" seems possible. I'm sure you can come with "Y" quite easily, heard anything about Ed Sheeran's tour?
Apple would have to be the only company around and by the time Apple “loses” in court its too late.
I mean, the obvious one is that they can revoke certification of a photo despite it being real.<p>The harder one is they can force apple to certify a fake photo.<p>the part that would be very hard but not outside the realm of plausibility, is that gov could force apple to introduce a bug in its pcc platform to link photos to the photographer in order to track and arrest inconvenient people. Apple says there are a bunch of protections against that but ultimately you are trusting apple to do it the way they say they are.<p>This entire system relies on trusting apple
> This entire system relies on trusting apple<p>It does indeed, and that is a fundamental flaw. but as has been discussed here, it is better than the alternative, which is no verification.<p>During the pandemic, I outlined a scheme for using blockchain technology for image provenance and authenticity tracking. The idea was that instead of any one entity assigning authenticity that it would be done in a crowdsourced manner and that the device would overlay a score whenever an image or video is shown to a user.<p>My assumption was that the desire of users to see such scores would force all manufacturers to implement this open protocol. But my approach suffered from chicken and egg problem, which Apple's does not.
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.
> or via software-level jailbreak of the device.<p>I’m surprised that even Apple calls jailbreaking, jailbreaking. Doesn’t that imply their own software is a jail?
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.
Seems to lead us down the slippery slope of requiring an Apple device, or a Google device (e.g., <a href="https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requires-approved-phone/" rel="nofollow">https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requi...</a>), or the device of some other entity (that may be mostly non-aligned with democratic values) in order to participate in society.<p>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.
I would also like the reference image from the sensor instead of the blown out HDR monstrosity Apple removed the ability to turn off after the iPhone 12.
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.
A photograph by itself should never be considered proof of anything.
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.
Was photo not authentic? Think of it "as seen by an iPhone", not "this is authentic event" verification.<p>But Apple likely would reject such photo because of inappropriate depth map / LiDAR data.
The timestamp wouldn’t match the event being depicted and the geotag would show the studio. And the depth sensing would show the image as flat.
That’s a lot of money and effort for a fake photo
How is this different to Content Credential and why isn’t Apple implementing that?
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)
I'm waiting for next year's talk at the CCC about it.
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.
presumably the metadata reader app would be integrated into the photo viewer app which would verify the digital sigs.<p>I have my doubts about this scheme but this is not one of them. If the point is that someone in principle could verify, that is enough for it to be useful, even if not everyone does.
1. Generate fake photo<p>2. Take a photo of it with iPhone<p>3. Apple's fancy reference image thing now says "omg it's real you guys"
I already can see this to be used in an effort to force everyone to use smartphones with proprietary corporate spyware.
Hey I predicted this awhile ago. Although it is kind of an obvious solution so I can’t claim much insight hehe.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135416">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135416</a>
By the time you made your comment, such a system had already been invented, even partially rolled out: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Credentials" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Credentials</a><p>Apple's protocol differs in that it requires a timestamping server to sign the file and centralising Apple as the single arbiter of truth. An excellent addition, if you trust Apple and the governments they're friendly with (I don't, especially the latter part).
That is actually a pretty good idea.
An even better idea would have been to integrate it as an extension for C2PA, which already has an ecosystem developed around it. The capture portion of the ecosystem has lots of problems, and this is one potential improvement.
Now I want to learn about "Apple Reference Video" and learn how to work with that to create verifiable video for journalists, news, documentary and other non-entertainment forms of media.
I’m fine with such technology so long as the courts don’t treat “verified” images as truth.
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.
According to the description in the article, <i>"an outside observer cannot determine whether any pair of reference images were taken by the same device."</i> and they <i>"avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor"</i><p>Whatever that means in detail...
I dont think this is relavent to that use case. It seems like this proposal would be an optional off by default feature. They also seem to be going to lengths to make it privacy first so the verified photos cannot be linked to a specific photographer.
Nothing stops you not verifying, or simply stripping the verification off.<p>What you are prevented from doing is adding a verification to a photo outside of the iOS image pipeline, or modifying the photo with the verification still in tact.
Or have I understood the feature's capability completely wrong?
As sexy as apple can be: the blog post just shows how unsexy security is for apple.
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.
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.<p>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?
"iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"<p>So the iPhone Duo won't have it?
This is cool, but also seem really complex and i'm not sure it makes sense pragmatically.<p>- 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<p>- i guess you need internet to take a picture. :(<p>- You are puting a lot of trust in apple's private cloud compute platform.<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> it sounds like its an optional mode you have to enable<p>It’s opt-in because your photo is sent to Apple’s servers. Only if it were on-device should they even consider making it default.<p>> i guess you need internet to take a picture<p>Not really, internet is required to process the reference image, but that can happen later if you’re not currently connected.<p>> are complex hardware attacks really that important?<p>No, but the floor shouldn’t be “trivially exploitable” like C2PA[0]. It’d be interesting if there were a middle ground but we don’t have anything like that as of now.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html</a>
I'm not sure i would describe the linked exploit as "trivial", but nonetheless point taken.<p>Ultimately though, i think all this might just mean we do not have a practical solution to this problem.<p>just to throw out some naive ideas, maybe the solution is to just sign the raw camera output and embed it in the metadata. If this is an optional feature meant for photojournalists, does file size really matter?
85 comments, 5 days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649222">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649222</a>
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.<p>EU wants Apple to implement digital fingerprinting to fight CSAM: overreach of power, total invigilation, nonono! Apple cannot comply! What about our privacy!<p>Apple implements the feature and sells it nicely wrapped in a PR material: oh, that's cool, innovative!
When is this turned into an RFC?
At this point it'd be easier to return to film.
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.<p>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!
All slop? I'm sure that some "Shrimp Jesus" or "Talking Strawberry" was never considered to be authentic by anybody. There is a lot of useless AI generated content of which everybody knows it's AI generated littering the web. Having it marked as AI will not stop that.
How do you figure?
It's extremely dystopian. This will result where you need an Apple or other big tech device in order for anyone to believe you.
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NFTs by another name...
terrible idea...<p>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.<p>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.