And I'm not sure it's even useful to solve. The presence/absence of a digital signature will never be the deciding factor in whether people accept/reject an image as authentic.

And in 2026, I don't think it's too big of a stretch to imagine that there are going to be people in power that can add + remove the metadata to whatever image they want, at will, to tell whatever story they want to create. Sadly.

> Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that.

The analog hole is alive and well:)

Well, all one has to do is look at the bigger picture of how rooted devices are being shuffled into 3rd rate/totally blocked experiences and the overall direction of things starts to take very clear shape.

At over a decade old, still prescient as ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Actually I think this approach is very forward looking! Attestation is on the cusp of becoming a very powerful technique. We just need to figure out how to build 100% bug-free and 100% secure hardware and software, and then it's gonna work great.

Not any rooted device, it must be rooted via an exploit. Still pretty bad, though

As far as AI-generated images go, that was a good one.

Wouldn’t the introduction of the lidar signals embedded in the photo (say used with apple’s faceid system) help here?

That might be detectable if they signed content contains focal-length metadata... but even then, some foresight and a collection of lenses would hide it.

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine

My bet is they do considerably worse. Digital cameras are not designed with security in mind. Arbitrary code execution has been achieved on many DSLRs and there's even been open-source firmware projects for some.

Unfortunately they're a little outside of my tinkering budget, but if anyone wants to send me some I'll do my best to pwn them. Can't be any harder than a Google flagship, one would imagine.

I have ordered a faulty Sony A7 IV motherboard, but due to its faulty-ness and the lack of the rest of the camera, I'm not sure how far I'll be able to get with it.

Why would someone paying for an expensive camera to damage the pixels of their images with "invisible" watermarks?

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!”