Re: [privacy] Digital Camera Fingerprints

[Dave Dittrich <dittrich () u washington edu>]

Justin Polazzo wrote:
>  http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/22/digital_cameras_have.html
>
> Digital cameras have unique "noise" fingerprints?
> A researcher at SUNY Binghamton reports that he can tell which camera
> took any given photo by matching the photo's unique "weak noise-like
> pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity."

I'm pretty sure that requires "raw" images, and seems to me that simply
changing format (raw->JPEG, JPEG->GIF) and also changing size by any
amount > 1 pixel would destroy the fingerprint.  The bad news is,
these kinds of things are trivial to get around using something as
simple as Mac OS X Automater to do repeated transforms on images.
The good news is that most criminals are too stupid to think of this.
The other bad news is, once it is known that lots of people are
getting busted because of some technique, the word spreads and the
stupid ones all start using a technique developed by a smarter one.
(And so the cycle repeats.... ;)

-- 
Dave Dittrich                          Information Assurance Researcher,
dittrich () u washington edu              The iSchool
http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich   University of Washington

PGP key      http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/pgpkey.txt
Fingerprint  FE97 0C57 0843 F3EB 49A1  0CD0 8E0C D0BE C838 CCB5
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