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It's worth noting that crypto-signed images have been around for a long time, just in specific professional cameras: https://www.dpreview.com/articles/3146736527/canondvke2

I imagine, as this sort of thing becomes more common, we'll see image "verification"/signing being a feature on all cameras, and eventually extend to mobile phone cameras for photos/videos as well.



And once it has been shared, screen-shotted, re-shared, compressed, phone taking a picture of it on a monitor etc

Sure, if you want to use it to try and prove you did take/create an image of something, but it doesn't help prove you /didn't/


IMO this would just help someone prove that a certain original image was made with a specific camera in regards of IP and to protect themselves at court against claims of having tampered with an image.

What we see on the web are mostly resized and heavily compressed images. Not sure how such a cryptographic signature could work in such cases.


Perhaps the publisher can provide a collection of signed versions of the image with a variety of file sizes / resolutions.


I think there would be some potential for an photo-based journalism platform that only publishes crypto-signed geo-tagged photos. It seems that stock photos, and even fake photos are the norm on mainstream news sites these days. It's very hard to get verified photographic evidence of news stories.


That's cool, but it seems like building a trusted chain of custody from source/capture, to editing (where lots of assets will be combined/composited together), to distribution will be tricky.

Plus, how does one guarantee that light hitting the camera sensor hasn't already been manipulated?




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