Sony Unlocks In-Camera Forgery-Proof Technology
Marketing hype, if I have physical access to the camera then I can get the key and sign anything. It might require specialized tools or training but it is nowhere near impossible. If I am a sovereign entity I can just compel someone to give me the key. I wouldn’t make any life changing decisions about anyone based solely on the presence of a signature.
So this is basically DRM, but straight out of the camera. I can only think of a few situations where attestation that early in the chain would actually be helpful (forensics, biometrics). However, even if they are using a per-camera secret, tamper proof hardware is often not very tamper proof, especially in consumer devices. Even things like SGX have glitch attacks and similar. I question if it would really stop a determined attacker from extracting the key and using it to sign edited images. It’s next to impossible to prevent jailbreaks. Further, a low tech proof of concept solution could be to telecine an edited image onto the sensor. You’d then be able to get a signed image of almost anything without even jail breaking the device
Nikon had this years ago. The signing key was extracted: https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...
What's stopping me from sending fake data to the signing chip along the same route that the image sensor uses to send real data to it?
> This technology is particularly applicable for passports and ID verification
What if you take a picture of a fake passport?
Presumably this relies on some sort of private signing key being stored securely on the camera somewhere. Do we really trust Sony's abilities to make it impossible to read out that key?
What if you take a picture of a modified picture?
Does each camera have its own signing key? If not, "signed by some camera" isn't that interesting.
Is there a public certificate registry?
What’s is the supposed business case for sharing raw, unmodified 42Mpix photos? And if they are still modified later on, and perhaps re-signed, that’s where I would attack.
Sony's marketing department and execs should know better than over promise like this. The camera can and will be hacked, guaranteed. Like PlayStation security, it may take a while, but it'll be done. And that's only if they haven't overlooked any obvious flaws. We all know if you have physical access to the hardware, it'll happen.
Anyways, ignore the hyperbole. It's just a press release by inexperienced marketers.
Would not surprise me if 10-years from now mainstream consumer devices and platforms attempt to make it impossible to produce content that’s not able to authenticate the provenance of media.
Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, Twitter, BBC, and others appear to be working to make this a reality via the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA):
Everyone's skeptical in this thread (including me), but it does seem like a useful thing to do if you can make it practical. Maybe incorporating some of the design elements of a "Secure Enclave" like Touch/Face ID where physical access destroys the private key? Not an expert in this field but curious what can actually be done.
I hope this time Sony's getRandomNumber function will return something other than 4:
Would be nice to see this on their xperia smartphones. They've been copying the Alpha look and feel for a while, and I've been wanting to see signed photos on phones for a while.
Looks like Polaroid is still king when it comes to unforgeable photographic evidence.
It seems reasonable for Sony to stake a bounty on this.