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Cryptography also has answers for some of this sort of thing. For example, you could use STARKs (Succinct Transparent Arguments of Knowledge) to create a proof that there exists a raw image I, and a signature S_I of I corresponding to the public key K (public input), and that H_O (public input) is a hash of an image O, and that O is the output of providing a specified transformation (cropping, JPEG compression) to I.

Then you give me O, I already know K (you tell me which manufacturer key to use, and I decide if I trust it), and the STARK proof. I validate the proof (including the public inputs K and H_O, which I recalculate from O myself), and if it validates I know that you have access to a signed image I that O is derived from in a well-defined way. You never have to disclose I to me. And with the advent of zkVMs, it isn't even necessarily that hard to do as long as you can tolerate the overhead of running the compression / cropping algorithm on a zkVM instead of real hardware, and don't mind the proof size (which is probably in the tens of megabytes at least).



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