Re:Apple Clarifies Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in i...
by pseudalopex on Friday September 01, 2023 @05:14PM
(#37356250)
Apple's system used a perceptual hash. Not cryptographic hashes. The threshold for human review was not auditable and could have been changed at any time. I hope your expert testimony was more careful.
Re:Apple Clarifies Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in i...
by Manuel_D on Friday September 01, 2023 @07:03PM
(#37357059)
I don't think it's an MD5 or SHA512 hash, since just changing one pixel would be enough to evade the scanner. My understanding is that it's heuristic similarity detection, which has a much wider footprint for collisions.
Re:Apple Clarifies Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in i...
by sebstefan on Monday September 04, 2023 @03:15AM
(#37377966)
It was a hashing technique that would output similar outputs with similar inputs, maximizing collisions rather than minimizing it
That's why people were initially all up in arms about
But they didn't need to do that.
A regular hash where "just changing one pixel would be enough to evade the scanner" is already good enough
Re:Apple Clarifies Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in i...
by sebstefan on Monday September 04, 2023 @03:23AM
(#37378015)
You just said yourself that hash collisions don't matter as "because upon viewing the image that matched, if it's not csam, it doesn't matter"
So when you say "a hash alone is meaningless, since in court there must be a presentation of evidence", you'd just present the image to court.
The hash is the trigger to call the authorities they handle the rest
And with a userbase the size of apple and people as pissy as reddit, you want to completely exclude a possibility of collisions or you'll get a repeat of the scenario we got in 2021
But even if there was an md5 hash collision back when md5 was the only one hash use, it still doesn't matter because upon viewing the image that matched, if it's not csam, it doesn't matter. Having said that, the chance of dozens of images matching hashes known to be associated to csam is also so unlikely as to be unthinkable. Where there is smoke, there is fire.
And further, a hash alone is meaningless, since in court there must be a presentation of evidence. If the image that set off the csam alarm by hash collision is say, an automobile, there is no case to be had. So all this talk about hash issues is absolutely moot.
Source: I have worked as an expert witness and presented for cases involving csam (back when we called it Child Pornography, because the CSAM moniker hadn't come about yet), so the requirements are well known to me.
Having said all that, I am an EFF member, and I prefer cryptography to work, and spying on users to be illegal.