Seeing how slowly laws move, the cynic says it's: should be inadmissible in any reasonable court, but will continue to be admissible, and will take a major set of incidents for changes to be enacted across many countries.

Yes. The story if admissable DNA evidence is instructive and terrifying.

https://daily.jstor.org/forensic-dna-evidence-can-lead-wrong...

There are probably ways to embed cryptographic hashes within images. Any device that creates images from the real world could have secret keys that can be used to validate any image created by said device.

We will still need a centralized party that holds the secret keys for validation through

This is the right approach, but there’s lots of complexity around transcoding. In the courtroom that’s less of an issue if you can get the original unmodified outputs, but broader applications need to think through what it means to be “verified”

What about the recording device itself? Refeed a video/frame/hash back to a security camera and it tells you if it was originally sourced from that specific camera or not.

The sci-fi dystopian answer would be entangled photon lights and off site image recording that preserves entanglement :-)

What shall we do with millions upon millions of existing mobile phones, and also surveillance cameras and dashcams?

Some of them possibly could be updated, but this will take time. Securing the keys within them is also going to be a problem; not all of them have a TPM.

There's no way this would work, either the master encryption key would be leaked, or someone would reverse-engineer the chip.

Also, what about someone putting a screen just in front of the sensor?

No need for that.

A private key is generated on device and never leaves it. It sits inside a TPM or equivalent.

The public key is pushed to a well-known site, visible to all.

Every shot is signed by hashing the bits into a reasonably short string (say, using sha512) and then encrypted with the private key.

Anyone can now decrypt the hash, and compare it with the hash they computed from the bits.

The problem, of course, is that any transformation whatsoever breaks the signature. You can't adjust levels and contrast, you can't even crop. Maybe it's a good property.

Why would you trust the key if it was generated on the device? Anyone could generate a key. You would either need a centralized server to sign that key, in which case you have to trust a centralized company / government agency.

You don't need a centralized database. You have 3 companies 3 different hashes. They catch bob stealing, on 3 different cameras. Each footage can be independently verified as authentic and not doctored. This would prevent anonymous found footage suggesting someone committed a crime.

You definitely don't want one single leakable entity.

Being able to fake something really doesn't matter all that much, as you'd still need to get that fake video into the surveillance camera system and you need to do so in the time between committing the crime and the police arriving, and without leaving a trace and hoping that whoever you try to incriminate doesn't have an alibi.

Fakes will be relevant for Twitter, TikTok and Co., where random videos are posted and distributed without sources, heavily edited and compressed, such that it is impossible to tell if that video ever started out as a real video or a fake. But in court the whole thing starts to fall apart the moment they ask where that video came from.

Without knowing what the current ones are, I'd guess we need improved chain-of-custody laws for evidence immediately!

Ah, but for law enforcement types to say "hey, look what we found on the surveillance video server!" is a potential problem. The power asymmetry in society is ripe for exploitation by the powerful. They just need some goons - of which there are plenty - to do the dirty work.

You have always been able to forge photographic evidence in natural looking ways (most easily by using completely real photography with misrepresented time or context).

And, of course, the easiest to falsify evidence (eyewitness testimony) is still admissible.

That's why you have to provide support for provenance, all of which is subject to examination and counterevidence.