Really interesting work, but I'm extremely sceptical that image attestation is a good idea. Think of the privacy implications of having a unique private key tied to your device and emitted in every photo that you take. On top of that are all of the anti-consumer practises that are already enabled by hardware attestation methods that prevent us from running our own software etc.

This is a very double-edged technology.

It also suffers the usual problem of these kinds of systems in that it only works for people who are already honest and not producing fake images. The people who really want to make fakes will find a way around the system either by exploiting their hardware somehow, or just by taking a photograph of the fake image with a secured camera.

The trade-off of privacy and device ownership for an illusion of trust doesn't seem to be worth it, in my opinion.

Tools for generating deep fake photographs are proliferating with greater ease of use and prominence in pop culture. Image authentication tools can defeat these deceitful developments by verifying that a digital image was actually produced by a physical camera. The challenge is that these tools must be robust to desirable image transformations.

Camera attestation uses digital signatures to prove an image's provenance from a camera. Lossy compression makes minute changes in order to reduce an image's size, and blurring or redacting regions of an image can protect its subjects. These changes invalidate an image's signature. Prior works use zero-knowledge (ZK) to prove a published image's edit history, but they do not survive lossy encoding such as the JPEG format.

We present \zkjpeg, a cryptographic tool for JPEG compression that proves an image was correctly compressed from a secret, committed input. In addition, our tool can verify a large family of image transformations by integrating them into JPEG compression with minimal cost.

That’s actually really neat. And in this day and age, extremely important in a huge number of domains.