Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

iimwally about 3 hours ago 57 commentsRead Article on security.apple.com

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Discussion (57 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tgsovlerkhgsel•4 minutes ago

This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

tristanj•about 2 hours ago

Apple doesn't address the modified photo replay situation, where you take a picture of an already edited image.

Photoshop / AI-gen an image -> display on a high-resolution monitor -> photograph the monitor with iPhone 18 Pro -> valid Apple Reference image.

To get valid reference photos, you can go to the actual physical location, put the iPhone/monitor in a cardboard box to block external light, then photograph the monitor. Paint the inside of the box using Vantablack (stopping reflections) and cover the LiDAR projector with tape.

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

pveierland•about 2 hours ago

Claim 7 in this patent application describes how depth sensors are used as part of an image authentication process, which would make such a workaround more difficult:

https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

The Apple Reference Image feature is here launched on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that both have built-in LiDAR sensors that could be used for this process.

tristanj•about 2 hours ago

Apple's current implementation doesn't integrate LiDAR. And LiDAR wouldn't be enough here, it's trivial to block the projector and hide the dot pattern. No dot pattern = iPhone thinks the object is far away, which is what happens in landscape photos.

A better fix is to take photos with all three iPhone cameras simultaneously, ideally as a 2-3s video, and use the parallax/multiple perspectives to extract depth information. The video files (Possibly audio too) could also be included with the verified image as additional verification.

They can also prevent photos if iPhone detects the LiDAR sensor is covered, similar to how Meta does it with their camera glasses.

dylan604•8 minutes ago

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

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

pveierland•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

sandcat_•about 1 hour ago

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.

halestock•about 2 hours ago

This approach makes me wonder if the future is actually going to move towards visual cryptography.

BugsJustFindMe•about 2 hours ago

iPhone lidar only works up to like 16 feet in the easiest lighting conditions (indoors) and may be functionally ineffective outdoors.

pveierland•about 2 hours ago

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.

gruez•about 2 hours ago

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

geokon•about 2 hours ago

furthermore, couldnt you do parallax from the multiple cameras as well as flicker the flash?

seems pretty easy to make it sufficiently difficult to trick the system

ricksunny•33 minutes ago

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

There’s no such thing as a Golden Gate Bridge.

Prove it.

baxtr•13 minutes ago

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

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

That’s a tradeoff I can live with.

osy•about 2 hours ago

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.

> 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.

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.

BugsJustFindMe•about 2 hours ago

> "But that's not the problem they're trying to solve."

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".

It fails the reasonable person test to say that the "something" in that phrase refers to the act of taking the photo itself.

Likewise in "distinguish between photographs that depict real events and...".

reader9274•about 1 hour ago

Yes, it is proving something actually happened, that is your monitor screen showing something you photographed.

brookst•about 1 hour ago

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?

spiderice•about 1 hour ago

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.

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

> Paint the inside of the box using Vantablack

But you're only allowed to do that if your name if Anish Kapoor

nvme0n1p1•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, such systems have been tried (and been hacked) for decades now.

https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...

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.

It's funny to see Apple fall into this same trap.

Rohansi•33 minutes ago

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.

amanj41•about 2 hours ago

Sony's analogous solution (https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/) 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

tristanj•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

dd8601fn•33 minutes ago

> I do this frequently when I want to take a photo through a window.

I feel really dumb for not having thought of this.

srik•about 1 hour ago

It's less about proving a photo's truth than about attesting it.

dinobones•about 2 hours ago

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).

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.

BugsJustFindMe•about 1 hour ago

You mean that it is sometimes very easy. But it is also sometimes impossible. You seem to be thinking only of poor quality photos of poor quality prints, but there's no basis for assuming those characteristics.

akersten•about 1 hour ago

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

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

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

wky•38 minutes ago

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.

0xWTF•14 minutes ago

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.

saagarjha•about 1 hour ago

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

wky•22 minutes ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

solenoid0937•36 minutes ago

Presumably you would only do this for images you plan on sharing to social media anyways, to prove that it's not AI generated.

PCC is quite good, about as close to private remote compute we can get without doing HME.

ed_mercer•8 minutes ago

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!

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

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.

jithinsankar•about 2 hours ago

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

brookst•about 1 hour ago

Sure, if it’s believable that the shot was perfectly flat at, what, 2 feet away?

WalterGR•about 2 hours ago

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

SoftTalker•about 1 hour ago

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

xeonmc•about 2 hours ago

NFTs by another name...

puppycodes•about 2 hours ago

terrible idea...

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

SXX•about 2 hours ago

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

Scrapped in 3..2..1..