Thread

1. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1789535685 · focus · HN ↗

   This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

   There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

   Edit: And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case, the insurance/ID verification use cases are perfectly fine with anything that raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort. Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

   1. alwillis · 1789551144 · focus · HN ↗

      > This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

      You have it all wrong.

      Apple Reference Image is not an id system; it's primarily a way to attest that the pixels recorded by the camera sensor have not been altered in any way; the pixels, metadata and timestamp are all cryptographically signed.

      There's no way to link a reference image to a person; it's also not possible to determine if a pair of images came from the same device.

      > And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case

      This is incorrect:

          When the image sensor is first initialized in the factory, it creates a
          cryptographic signing identity, sharing only the public key with the
          factory. The SEP similarly creates a separately-attested signing
          identity. These identities are bound together into the device manifest,
          allowing us to later check whether a particular sensor and SEP are from
          the same device.
      
          The final signature on a reference image is a composite post-quantum
          signature combining RSA-3072 and ML-DSA-87. To our knowledge, Apple
          Reference Image is the only image provenance system that provides
          quantum-secure defenses.
      

      So… a nation-state can't really do anything here unless they acquire alien technology. If something crazy happens (solar flare or EMP?), a fraudulent reference image can be revoked.

      > Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

      I would imagine there will be a way to confirm an Apple Reference Image on the web. Pretty soon, 3rd parties will be able to verify the image themselves:

          Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main
          image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and
          determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and
          macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.

      1. monocasa · 1789561959 · focus · HN ↗

         Nation states almost certainly have the ability to extract the private keys out of an image sensor and SEP. Outside of superpowers even if you're willing to do it destructively.

         They can then sign their own fraudulent images.

         1. autoexec · 1789576782 · focus · HN ↗

            The NSA has probably already forced Apple to hand the keys over to them.

            1. alwillis · 1789581423 · focus · HN ↗

               > The NSA has probably already forced Apple to hand the keys over to them.

               Again, that's not how it works.

               There's no set of keys and certificates they could give to the NSA. Every iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max has a unique set of cryptographic keys, most of which can't be accessed by Apple.

               The first thing that happens is when photo sensor is initialized at the factory, it creates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair; the private key is never disclosed. The public key is signed by the factory's certificate authority.

               This ain't X.509 where VeriSign's key pair is sitting in a HSM at their HQ and in theory could be forced to sign a fraudulent certificate or revoke someone's valid website certificate.

               1. microtonal · 1789629397 · focus · HN ↗

                  They don’t need the signing keys though. Apple could roll out a separate version of sepOS to assist law enforcement that signs at they will.

                  Also, while the unique device ID is supposed to be burned into fuses by the SE during production, it is kinda hard to prove for anyone that is not Apple that this indeed happens in the way they state.

                  Personally I’m not a strong believer in such theories though. I think it’s more mundane and Apple helps law enforcement by having some weak defaults. Like how iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but most chats are available to law enforcement because most people turn on iCloud Backups/Messages in iCloud and not ADP, resulting in chats only being encrypted at-rest in iCloud. This is only stated somewhere in a footnote in one of their security documents.

                  There are more weak defaults like that in various crucial apps (e.g. WhatsApp) that makes most important stuff available to law enforcement when needed.

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