This is not the solution for this essentially unsolvable problem. It offers a false sense of assurance since there will undoubtedly be ways of extracting the signature apparatus and then using it to produce fake signatures. It also creates a dangerous opportunity for all kinds of authoritarian actors to inject tracking and identifying information in digital artefacts.

It's much less painful to abandon the idea that photographs, videos and sound can be ultimately trusted.

Sounds like an invasion of privacy. Your personal pictures and videos shouldn’t have a unique digital signature so the police or a bad actor can identify which device it was taken on.

This seems like a good idea at first but what about whistleblowers or informants?

> Sounds like an invasion of privacy. Your personal pictures and videos shouldn’t have a unique digital signature so the police or a bad actor can identify which device it was taken on.

You've misunderstood the point. The goal is not to identify users. The goal is to sign messages to ensure they were actually outputted by a service.

Wouldn't have to tie it back to you. It would be enough to say "Canon affirms this photo was taken directly on a model X". Which would then tell you that this was the unedited photo and could be trusted.

You mean like how it's done with printers? https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

Nikon had something like this (the "Image Authentication System", which used a builtin key to sign the images) but somebody managed to pull the signing key off the camera:

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...

Same thing happened with Canon's implementation the year before.

Thanks!

I figured it had already been tried.

I wonder if it can still be done.