alt Hacker NewsAside from the fact that this was obviously never viable and the entire problem is clearly unsolvable if you sit down and really probe it for fifteen minutes, what I find most frustrating about this is that the false promise of preserving photos as reliable evidence is actively harmful.
You will not build a perfect system, or even something near perfect. The best you're going to do is make it so that it's hard to casually present AI photos as real, leaving only the cases where it really matters. In the "best" case, you've just made the public more trusting of photos in general, so that when there's actual money or power on the line that makes jumping through the hoops to fake authenticity worth it, the public is more susceptible.
The best outcome at this point is for everyone to get on the same page that photos have roughly the same probative value now as drawings. Poorly thought out snake oil efforts to prove authenticity are only going to delay that.
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I think it's useful even if it can be spoofed. Many people don't even bother to edit visible watermarks out of AI photos/videos. I'm fairly certain this will defeat 99.9% of malicious users, many of whom won't even know it exists until someone points out it's missing.
People are concerned that the technology will lend additional credence to the last 0.1%. But anyone who thinks about the technology for 2 minutes will see you can just point the camera at the screen. In cases where it really matters (a court of law, internet arguments between nerds) people will know it's not 100% reliable. Locks can be picked, and signatures can be forged, but that doesn't make them useless.
"C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact With Reality" does not survive contact with reality where very, very few users would even think of rooting their phone so they can create signed fake images.
What makes you so certain that this valuable research showing weaknesses in today's systems will render the C2PA concept useless forever?
Yes, software LPEs are a risk -- as they are in every nontrivial computer system. New ones will appear, and old ones will be closed in time, as TFA acknowledges.
Re hardware attacks: The (neat!) glitch injection attack the author describes in the linked "lighter" page only raises the implementation cost of doing image certification properly. For example, if the camera module presented only an interface that dumped raw RGB or JPEG-encoded data plus a digital signature that used a private key known only to the manufacturer, then all that would be required to verify a "downstream" image would be to keep a copy of those original bytes inside the final (potentially cropped, filtered, AI-ed, etc.) image, in the worst case roughly doubling its size on disk (though certainly more efficient schemes could be designed). Any interested third party could then compare the original and final images by eye and decide for themselves whether or not the subsequent processing materially changed the image's "meaning".
Finally: Does the existence of lock picks or bolt cutters render padlocks pointless today? Does it corrode society by encouraging people to mistakenly believe that anything they put behind a $5 padlock will be safe forever? No, and no.
I don’t think there is a technical solution to this problem but I think there is a legal one.
Make it a legal requirement to mark AI generated photos and enforce penalties for posting unmarked AI generations. Social media should also mark the country of origin for each post, with the knowledge that posts from your own country are covered by these laws.
Are we entering a world where if I took a picture with a film camera and scanned it, it would be rejected as not real?
This is ridiculous.
In my opinion, the benefits for end users are rather minimal since I doubt an average person would ever be checking C2PA provenance data, but there is a commercial incentive for Google and others to promote C2PA, since it makes preparing training material for Machine Learning significantly easier, and perhaps as a smaller benefit justifies hardware attestation that locks users down into proprietary OSes.