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85 comments, 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649222
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 in the phrase "something actually happened" the "something" refers to the act of taking the photo.
Likewise, in "photographs that depict real events", no reasonable person could say that "real events" includes fabrications.
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.
iPhone lidar only works up to like 16 feet in the easiest lighting conditions (indoors) and may be functionally ineffective outdoors.
So you need a big enough screen to cover the entire field of view at 16 ft? Sounds expensive
It's only expensive if you're poor.
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.
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.
They can also prevent photos if iPhone detects the LiDAR sensor is covered, similar to how Meta does it with their camera glasses.
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.
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
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.
terrible idea...
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.
Scrapped in 3..2..1..
What if someone take the photo of the forged photo displayed on another device, doesn’t the forged photo become an authentic one?