Apple isn’t going to touch this with a 10-foot pole.
The provenance “proof” these approaches provide is very tenuous and nowhere near the “this is a real photo of a real world event taken by a real camera and not an AI image” proof that marketing types like to push.
Apple doesn’t want a PR disaster where some crazy image is totally fake but becomes world news because it is “cryptographically signed as being from a real iPhone so it must be real!”
>Images captured with an opt-in Reference mode can be authenticated to confirm they were taken with an iPhone. Authenticating is done by tapping the Reference badge on the image, which sends the raw image, sensor signatures, capture time frame, and the unique hardware identifiers of the sensor to Apple's Private Cloud Compute (PCC) servers. PCC uses the information to determine whether the camera captured the photo, gives it a unique ID, and then returns an authenticated version to the user's device.
Yeah, it might never ship, or it might not ship as described, or that might be exactly what they do - I love being wrong.
If it does ship like that, it’s hard to not imagine a situation as I described earlier - an “iPhone Reference Image” being used to propagate fake news, at which point the credibility of the feature goes to 0 (and Apple’s takes a severe hit).
The proof itself relies on asymmetric crypto, and that part is not tenuous (well, until Q Day, but that's a different story...).
But:
- You cannot prove that no one has ever been able to break a Secure Enclave or a YubiKey or another secure element. That's okay, these companies focus on making it so expensive that it's not worth doing.
- The analog "attack vector" is real, but that was always true with analog cameras as well. Anyone could have taken an analog picture of a screen, or even painted a hyper realistic image of something that never happened.
I think a realistic goal for provenance is to at least get to parity with analog cameras ("this is a picture directly from a sensor"), not to make the perfect system for proving that a photo is of a real world event.
The provenance “proof” these approaches provide is very tenuous and nowhere near the “this is a real photo of a real world event taken by a real camera and not an AI image” proof that marketing types like to push.
Apple doesn’t want a PR disaster where some crazy image is totally fake but becomes world news because it is “cryptographically signed as being from a real iPhone so it must be real!”