I don't understand why few people are pointing out the obvious vulnerability here that you can control the wires going into the photosensor controller and pretend that the photosensor is capturing whatever image you want. I imagine it's not exactly trivial to do this, but a grad student with an FPGA could probably figure it out.
> For example, a screen attack still works: photograph a screen displaying an AI image and you get a signed photo of a fake. But it's always nice seeing big actors interested in addressing this problem.
Yeah, very nice. So this whole idea basically doesn't work - but we get a new stealth way to embed metadata in an image that can be used for tracking...
(And a new narrative why cameras need to have TPMs and locked-down firmware as well)
In days of old, a Polaroid photo was considered "proof of capture".
I've got a Polaroid daylab 35 plus sitting in storage somewhere (https://www.instantoptions.com/wp/faqs/daylab/). You can project a slide through it onto Polaroid film, expose it, and have the image there.
I was also able to find a company that did slide printing. It was possible to send them a digital image and they'd send you back a slide with that image... which I then used to make a Polaroid of that image.
I had a classic 600 Polaroid photo of a UFO landing.
I expect in the near future all digital cameras to digitally sign the images they take. Even before AI slop, it was useful to avoid manual alterations. AI makes it all too easy, so it makes sense.
However, this will certify only the original image. I think the missing part of this is additional layers of certification which allow some image editing (e.g., rotating, contrast, etc.) yet clearly document that the image was modified and link to the original image ID. Kind of like a signed git log.
Signing the raw image data wouldn't require also signing the EXIF metadata. For privacy, you could later strip out everything except the raw image and the camera's signature and still prove that the image is unaltered.
Ontop of this, including a photo edit history in a photo including the original photo would increase the size of a photo to be completely unusable or unshareable.
I understood the GP so that only some unique ID or hash of the original image would be included, not the image itself. Basically like the commit chain of Git but without the actual content blobs.
You could use this data to prove that image B is an edit of image A if you already have both A and B.
I still think this is a bad idea, because this all requires the images to have some sort of ID - and that seems like a prime target for tracking.
There will always be a way around it. There are even open-source alternative/hacked firmwares for professional DSLR cameras where tampering with the signing may be possible.
And this still doesn't help any other kind of image e.g. screenshots, photo of a screen etc. that can make the camera signatures largely pointless depending on the context.
The idea is to be able to prove that a photo you took was captured by a camera, not generated. That would be helpful in the context of a disputed news story, a court case, etc.
Yeah, very nice. So this whole idea basically doesn't work - but we get a new stealth way to embed metadata in an image that can be used for tracking...
(And a new narrative why cameras need to have TPMs and locked-down firmware as well)
In days of old, a Polaroid photo was considered "proof of capture".
I've got a Polaroid daylab 35 plus sitting in storage somewhere (https://www.instantoptions.com/wp/faqs/daylab/). You can project a slide through it onto Polaroid film, expose it, and have the image there.
I was also able to find a company that did slide printing. It was possible to send them a digital image and they'd send you back a slide with that image... which I then used to make a Polaroid of that image.
I had a classic 600 Polaroid photo of a UFO landing.
ps:most important: cam/lens settings also in the digital sig, what for a screen is different
However, this will certify only the original image. I think the missing part of this is additional layers of certification which allow some image editing (e.g., rotating, contrast, etc.) yet clearly document that the image was modified and link to the original image ID. Kind of like a signed git log.
You could use this data to prove that image B is an edit of image A if you already have both A and B.
I still think this is a bad idea, because this all requires the images to have some sort of ID - and that seems like a prime target for tracking.
And this still doesn't help any other kind of image e.g. screenshots, photo of a screen etc. that can make the camera signatures largely pointless depending on the context.
Would that ever be relevant for a screenshot?