Month: August 2021

Apple letting the content-scanning genie out of the bottle

When Apple announced that they would be scanning iPhones for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the push-back appears to have taken them by surprise. Since then, Apple has been engaging with experts and developing their proposals to mitigate risks that have been raised. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the issues with Apple’s CSAM detection system and what I’ve learned from their documentation and events I’ve participated in.

Technically Apple’s CSAM detection proposal is impressive, and I’m pleased to see Apple listening to the community to address issues raised. However, the system still creates risks that will be difficult to avoid. Governments are likely to ask to expand the system to types of content other than CSAM, regardless of what Apple would like to happen. When they do, there will be complex issues to deal with, both for Apple and the broader technology community. The proposals also risk causing people to self-censor, even when they are doing nothing wrong.

How Apple’s CSAM detection works

The iPhone or iPad scans images for known CSAM just before it uploads the image to Apple’s cloud data storage system – iCloud. Images that are not going to be uploaded don’t get scanned. The comparison between images and the database is made in such a way that minor changes to CSAM, like resizing and cropping, will trigger a match, but any image that wasn’t derived from a known item of CSAM should be very unlikely to match. The results of this matching process go into a clever cryptographic system designed to ensure that the user’s device doesn’t learn the contents of the CSAM database or which of their images (if any) match. If more than a threshold of about 30 images match, Apple will be able to verify if the matching images are CSAM and, if so, report to the authorities. If the number of matching images is less than the threshold, Apple learns nothing.

Risk of scope creep

Now that Apple has built their system, a risk is that it could be extended to search for content other than CSAM by expanding the database used for matching. While some security properties of their system are ensured through cryptography, the restriction to CSAM is only a result of Apple’s policy on the content of the matching database. Apple has clearly stated that it would resist any expansion of this policy, but governments may force Apple to make changes. For example, in the UK, this could be through a Technical Capability Notice (under the Investigatory Powers Act) or powers proposed in the Online Safety Bill.

If a government legally compelled them to expand the matching database, Apple may have to choose between complying or leaving the market. So far, Apple has refused to say which of these choices they would take.

Continue reading Apple letting the content-scanning genie out of the bottle

Exploring an Attack on Image Scaling Algorithms

In their 2019 publication ‘Seeing is Not Believing: Camouflage Attacks on Image Scaling Algorithms’, Xiao et al. demonstrated a fascinating and frightening exploit on a few commonly used and popular scaling algorithms. Through what Quiring et al. referred to as adversarial preprocessing, they created an attack image that closely resembles one image (decoy) but portrays a completely different image (payload) when scaled down. In their example (below), an image of sheep could scale down and suddenly show a wolf.

Two images are shown, the left shows the original attack image, which depicts a group of sheep. The right shows the scaled down attack image, which shows a grey wolf.
On the left, a group of sheep can be seen in a slightly stretched out photo (the decoy). When scaled down to the correct dimensions (right), the image shows a grey wolf (payload). This is an example of an attack image.

These attack images can be used in a number of scenarios, particularly in data poisoning of deep learning datasets and covert dissemination of information. Deep learning models require large datasets for training. A series of carefully crafted and planted attack images placed into public datasets can poison these models, for example, reducing the accuracy of object classification. Essentially all models are trained with images scaled down to a fixed size (e.g. 229 × 229) to reduce the computational load, so these attack images are highly likely to work if their dimensions are correctly configured. As these attack images hide their malicious payload in plain sight, they also evade detection. Xiao et al. described how an attack image could be crafted for a specific device (e.g. an iPhone XS) so that the iPhone XS browser renders the malicious image instead of the decoy image. This technique could be used to propagate payload, such as illegal advertisements, discreetly.

The natural stealthiness of this attack is a dangerous factor, but on top of that, it is also relatively easy to replicate. Xiao et al. published their own source code in a GitHub repository, with which anyone can run and create their own attack images. Additionally, the maths behind the method is also well described in the paper, allowing my group to replicate the attack for coursework assigned to us for UCL’s Computer Security II module, without referencing the paper authors’ source code. Our implementation of the attack is available at our GitHub repository. This coursework required us to select an attack detailed in a conference paper and replicate it. While working on the coursework, we discovered a relatively simple way to stop these attack images from working and even allow the original content to be viewed. This is shown in the series of images below.

Continue reading Exploring an Attack on Image Scaling Algorithms