With photos, I could see a cryptographic solution. Of course it would still need some kind of centralized trust, but it's doable if people cared enough. It could be applied by cameras themselves.
This is already a thing. Leica cryptographically signs images. Useful for establishing trust for photojournalists I guess. I’m not sure how deep the chain goes. Do they have hardware attention down to the sensor? You could take a picture of a screen, but that would likely have some other tell-tales. Especially if Leica took another step like putting a depth sensor in the package and added its data to the signature.
A camera could be hacked with unrestricted physical access, but that doesn't make the suggestion unsound, it only requires there be a process for revoking trust in specific signing keys. This is already part of C2PA.
And the value of the signature is also going to vary by who claims it. Improbable photos signed by a random camera body sold to an anonymous consumer should be treated with more suspicion than one a newswire agency publicly claims, for instance.
A camera should not need to be hacked. What do you expect to accomplish by hacking the camera?
We should be able to move certificates on and off it because they would most likely expire anyway. So, you can get the keys from the camera, what then? You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then? You do this enough and get caught, you lose your cert and can never pass the kyc to get another one.
Then every picture you used it for in the past would start showing a big red exclamation point with a note, "This is a scumbag user known for forging images".
Same way it works for tls and code signing. Public reports bad actors to the signing authority. They and/or independent firms investigate. You self report theft. It's not like we are inventing pki from scratch here and wondering what an implementation would look like. We have decades of use to look at.
Besides wasn't your argument "hacking" a minute ago? So you concede that then? You seem to have moved on.
Yes, "the public" includes experts in the subject field and independent witnesses to events.
If your argument is that images can't be verified, you are going to need to provide some kind of backing to that. We know well that there are watermarks and tell tale signs to go off. Regardless, if they are depicting real world events, outside confirmation can be used.
You also don't seem to understand the point of the signature. It's not to prevent fake images, it's to tie an identity to images so that that trust can be established and permanently lost in the case of a malicious actor. Your arguments repeatedly have failed to engage with the actual system proposed.
> You also don't seem to understand the point of the signature. It's not to prevent fake images, it's to tie an identity to images so that that trust can be established and permanently lost in the case of a malicious actor.
It was proposed as a solution to: how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?
You seem to be saying it is not a solution. I agree.
I have already said, it's done by establishing trust by tying identity to images. Your assertions aren't a counter to that. You thinking they are shows a lack of understanding of how to verify truth on a fundamental level.
Let's also list the points you have conceded by quietly giving them up:
1. Hacking the camera is irrelevant.
2. Images can be verified.
Do you want to actually engage with the conversation? The funny thing is that there are engineering challenges in this space, but you don't seem to understand the basics well enough to even get to that point.
> I have already said, it's done by establishing trust by tying identity to images.
You've said it, but you've not credibly substantiated it.
Imagine a famous photo journalist dies and there emerge "AI" fake pics signed with creds stolen from his hacked camera. Trust isn't part of a solution. It is part of the problem.
Then the cert is pulled with a date and the timestamps on the images can be used to verify when they happened. This is generally how you'd handle theft. You can then also resign with a new cert at a later date.
Besides, after a famous journalist dies, their work is already famous, people already know it or don't. This is a contrived and irrelevant example.
Again, this is not hypothetical, we already know how this works. Next one please.
And that's problematic if the certificate is also stolen at the same time, but that's why there is an authority to validate issues and address what needs to be done to resolve them.
The premise is not that it couldn't be faked. It would be more practical to remove the key from the hardware and just use it to sign images if you wanted to do that.
The idea is that a centralized source of trust would revoke certificates belonging to bad actors or those that were stolen.
Cool. Every time I want to pass off AI images I'll buy a new Nikon camera. Always a Nikon until their cert is revoked. I'll short their stock before that.
