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. mitxela · 1789552719 · focus · HN ↗

         You'll still need an iPhone, the verification is linked to the specific iPhone, and the specific iPhone is linked to you.

         1. alwillis · 1789581772 · focus · HN ↗

            The reference image isn't linked to any particular iPhone or person:

                We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public
                credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public
                association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The
                final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service,
                after validation by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s
                strongest technical guarantees.
            
                Our implementation also protects the
                confidentiality of the image itself, including from Apple. Merely
                capturing a reference image should never expose the actual pixels to
                Apple or anyone else. We achieve this through the exceptional privacy
                properties of PCC — the nodes themselves are architected so that not
                even Apple can access image data, just as Apple cannot see the
                information processed for Apple Intelligence in PCC.

            1. microtonal · 1789631026 · focus · HN ↗

               The reference image isn't linked to any particular iPhone or person

               It is for Apple, to the extend that if there are backdoors and weaknesses in their PCC, they could register a device signing identity to Apple signature mapping.

               I think the line of reasoning is that you have to trust Apple anyway, since they could also roll out a malicious image to your particular phone, but I still feel like PCC is much harder to verify/audit than an iPhone already is.

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