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It would be great if they could use the LiDAR scanner to sign a depth map of the scene in front of the camera. It would show if you photographed a flat image.
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The sensor already uses phase detection autofocus. You can create a depth map out of it. iPhone X used its dual cameras and that phase data for depth maps.
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They could use the camera aperture to take a second photo and calculate blur.
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If that became popular, the AIs would learn how to generate a realistic depth map along with any generated image.
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How would that work? I thought the premise here is that you can fool the apple camera by taking a (very carefully aligned) picture of a still image (printed out).

A depth map from the apple camera (again, signed) would show that the entire image had the same distance from the camera.

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You're right. I think my comment above doesn't make sense - it wouldn't help in this case.
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The photos are cryptographically signed in the apple image pipeline so it's not as simple as just AI generating something. That said, I can't see how this is any different to all the other times we have embedded crypto keys in consumer hardware where eventually someone finds a way to extract the key and the whole thing is busted open.
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Given the whole private cloud bit, I am assuming they keep the private keys server side and never let them out.
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How would the server know that the request is coming from a real iPhone?

This is a pretty standard application of trusted computing and can be done entirely on the iPhone. A server would only possibly be needed for anonymization (while retaining key revocation capabilities if a key does end up leaking), but there are serverless ways to do even that (TPMs have supported these for a while now).

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It wouldn't, but you could validate that a particular picture was created at a particular time, and had not changed, for example, especially with metadata that you may not want to share but that establishes certain parameters like gps coordinates. A lock, rather than an end-to-end pixel signature, which shows what was contemporaneous rather than exact provenance. If an event happened on day 0000-00-00 00:00:00am, but your photo was taken at some other time, it casts doubt.

I think a big part of validation for things like these are just "could it have been modified since Z event happened", because Z was not something people paid attention to before.

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I think there's a chain of trust. The sensor signs raws, and the private cloud takes signed raws, does minimal processing so they're at least coherent, and re signs that output (maybe even including the original signed raw as well in the image file).
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That's a good point, You might still be able to trick the cloud to sign your photos, but that's something they could patch in updates without losing control of the key. They could have the server only sign photos taken on the latest ios version.
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And honestly you could have a similar antitampering oracle that was at least obscured, in terms of "we've detected tampering but won't tell you how or why", which is frustrating but I have to imagine that 99.9%+ of images are clean.
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Even simpler, a 3D printed relief with an image "stamped" on it, now you effectively have a 3D image.
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…and the PDAF data will show how shallow it is.
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... don't make it so shallow then. Perfectly possible in a consumer-friendly 3D printer for a face or even human body if you have lots of time for the prints.
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You’re well on the way to 1:1 replicas at this point. Next you’ll need to match the thermal signature and the exact weather in the sky for the time at that location.
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Then take and sign a one-second video and you’re adding a few orders of magnitude of complexity again.
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Sounds like Rincewind's spell from the Octavo.
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but what are we really trying to solve here. you're suggesting a helluvalota work for what purpose?
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The 'ol "analog hole". Never been able to patch that gap.
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Yes, if your adversary can generate a high-fidelity 3D moving replica of a scene, they can deceive you that it’s real. But can they really?
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And what if you take a picture across a IR-filtered window?
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Then you won’t be able to prove it was a genuine photograph? That sounds like the right failure mode.
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That's a cool idea.
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Pretty sure it does that already.
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One can 3d-print the AI generated image and photograph that. /s
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that's an authentic photo, not the subject/image, the photo is authentic.
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It will look like you took a picture of a screen or print out
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People have constructed video walls so high resolution they can film TV series in front of them and to an audience it's indistinguishable from a real set. It's extremely cost-effective for things like space fantasy that needs lots of exotic-looking backdrops, apparently.

It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'

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The high resolution video wall is quite simple. The hard part and why this has not been done earlier is that for filming, they had to synchronize the rendered background with the movement of the camera.
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Movement is solved by tracking the camera's position and projecting the background from there.

Proof of captured image with hardware-based-attestation can be increased by adding extra information besides the RGB channels, like depth mapping (which a projected screen wouldn't be able to fake), and eventually light field recording (plenoptic imaging, e.g. Lytro).

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also no, even in the high rez video walls its still possible to tell. maybe to an "audience" no but there are lots of fundamental flaws with video walls that make them not the same as filming it for real. all of those flaws show up in the final image and could be detected.

things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.

case in point, outside of a few specific niche cases like the mandalorian, that virtual production video wall thing is not actually being used all that much because of the amount of post shoot cleanup required to fix all those issues, it wasnt actually that much cheaper and its not really better either. especially when you factor in how hard it is to shoot that way.

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> things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.

Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.

Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.

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If they’re spending millions on faking an image, okay fine. That’s clearly not the security model intended for this feature though.
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How large and pixel dense does a display need to be for it to convincingly fill an image sensor?

I suspect it’s significantly less than millions.

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Stamp only proves you did the photo and probably some metadata like when where etc.

It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.

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The credibility comes from who took the photo. The next logical and easy step is for this metadata to flow to the user agent. I'll know that it was taken by a legit journalist photographer. And id not, I can have my user agent make it fuzzy or replaced with a kitten photo.
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I think this is where we are headed. This feature seems useless on it's own since someone will eventually find a way to extract the key from the iphone and sign any image. But if they could make it so every iphone uses it's own key and the photos show "Taken by xyz" and it's linked to their icloud or identity somehow. That way images shared around will still be able to be linked to a source that you can choose to trust and the viewer can know it wasn't modified from what that person shot.

Then we might move to an age where photos which were not signed by someone will be treated as fake.

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You may have forgotten that the world is driven by screenshots, and so a screenshot of a picture with the `(X) Verified by Apple to be Joe Schmoe` tacked on will be just as good as real verification for a lot of people.

What we need is almost something like the classic "press C+A+D to log in" or the idea of "above the browser pane"... something an image cannot show you unless it's legit. Perhaps a personal thumbprint icon that is different for each viewer, so you know its your device telling you that something is real and not just some mock fake thing?

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I don't think we'll treat them as fake but they would probably undergo more scrutiny - perhaps in a crowd-sourced manner that provides an overall score of probable legitimacy.
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Phones all have hardware security modules with keys stored inside. That will absolutely be in use for this new feature.
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You actually think the Secure Enclave is useless.
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Right. All of your pictures will include identifying information. Same will happen for LLM generated text.
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what is it missing then?
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I bet there exists data from the 3 cameras to represent some depth to the image.
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Yes.
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