Camera fingerprinting

avidgrapher

After reading this article from BBC, I was wondering if GrapheneOS can mitigate against camera fingerprinting (similar to printer steganography).

It seems that even after removing EXIF data, it's still possible to know a photo was captured using a Pixel phone, simply by "image non-uniformity".

Is there any way other than distorting the photo (reducing resolution, adding filters, etc.)?

roddyd

You could try applying a subtle Gaussian blur to hide the exact distribution of pixels within the image. That isn't implemented in GrapheneOS but you could do it in an image editor or make an app to automate it.

roddyd

There is no way to prevent this kind of fingerprinting without modifying the image because the sensitive data is part of the image itself. It's like if a password was visible in the image, the only way to remove the password is to change that part of the image.

User2288

Yes. You'd have to use various "filters" to modify the pixels of the image. From blur effects to smoothing, denoise or add noise, etc.

I think you'd also need multiple photo samples from a camera before you can establish a signature.

I can foresee the creation of applications that recreate "uniformity" in the future, if this fingerprinting becomes a problem.