Encryption for professional cameras.

[Robert M Poole]

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https://twitter.com/dcuthbert/status/810236713796771840

 

Interesting thoughts from Daniel Cuthbert a tech guy and Leica photographer.

 

www.robertpoolephotography.com

[pico]

I am not a wizard at this stuff. Tell me if this is a bad dream.

 

My camera transfers images in almost real-time via wi-fi to a module I have hidden nearby. No images are kept but for a few seconds in my camera. Everything is sent encoded from the module to our safe place. The transfer module saves nothing but TCP/IP success or failure data.

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Edited December 22, 2016 by pico

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[Robert M Poole]

I am not a wizard at this stuff. Tell me if this is a bad dream.

 

My camera transfers images in almost real-time to a cell-connection either in my back pack or to a module I have placed nearby. No images are kept but for a few seconds in my camera. Everything is sent by my module via satellite to a safe place.

This was my suggestion. Lack of reliable comms in remote places, I suppose sat phones alleviate this. From reading around a bit it looks like speeds are very slow (slower than dialup) according to one website I found, one picture would take 3 hours to send. You could of course reduce file sizes, compress etc but would still take a minute a picture and the loss in quality would be too much.

 

www.robertpoolephotography.com

[pico]

This was my suggestion. Lack of reliable comms in remote places, I suppose sat phones alleviate this. From reading around a bit it looks like speeds are very slow (slower than dialup) according to one website I found, one picture would take 3 hours to send. You could of course reduce file sizes, compress etc but would still take a minute a picture and the loss in quality would be too much.

 

www.robertpoolephotography.com

 

Thank you, Robert. I would accept long transfer rates to satellite as as a reasonable trade-off against impossibility. I am thinking of a combat photographer who plants  his little  x-fer devices and moves on. Given how small, inexpensive and feasible these things can be,  a photographer could carry dozens.

 

Pico, still dreaming.

Thanks for being there Robert.

Edited December 22, 2016 by pico

[bencoyote]

https://twitter.com/dcuthbert/status/810236713796771840

Interesting thoughts from Daniel Cuthbert a tech guy and Leica photographer.

www.robertpoolephotography.com

Quite frankly he's wrong and that kind of idea shows that he hasn't thought about the topic in detail. So lets assume that there is some covert mechanism to get the image data from the camera to some local storage place like a battery powered hard drive in your pocket or camera bag or something.

 

If you are stopped and searched how is this any different than having taken the SD card out of your camera and hidden it in your gear. This is already a common practice. Being caught mere possession of the image data still leaves you vulnerable and provides your adversaries with incriminating evidence that you are a "spy" or "an enemy of the state" or that you know where thus and such person they are looking is or at least was.

 

How are you going to transfer the data covertly? If you use a wire that reduces your flexibility and could make your photo taking more obvious thus undercutting your stealthiness. If you use a wireless signal, it essentially broadcasts that you are there making you more succeptable to detectors and locators.

 

Security by obscurity generally doesn't work for long because within a short time after a new product with this new covert transfer system that he proposes is announced, security or military people will start to become educated about what to look for in terms of the receiver. Ten or 15 years ago, security people wouldn't have thought to check your cell phone for evidence, now they regularly do.

[bencoyote]

Thank you, Robert. I would accept long transfer rates to satellite as as a reasonable trade-off against impossibility. I am thinking of a combat photographer who plants  his little  x-fer devices and moves on. Given how small, inexpensive and feasible these things can be,  a photographer could carry dozens.

 

Pico, still dreaming.

Thanks for being there Robert.

That is still probably not within the current state of the art. Take for example the SPOT satellite communicator http://www.findmespot.com/en/. It transmits data using battery power. I'm sure that they could shrink it a bit from its current size with better battery technology but things like antennas are hard to shrink. It also requires a very clear line of sight to work. Furthermore, you can't escape the encryption problem. If you don't want anybody with a receiver in the vicinity or any world power who happens to have a good spy satellite in the area to eavesdrop on your data for military intelligence then you still have to encrypt the data. So what is the difference, encrypt the data within the transfer protocol or encrypt the data in the camera. It is still encryption just with a different user interface.

 

Also leaving little satellite upload modules along your path would provide valuable breadcrumbs leading to you and your potentially valuable data caches. Since they would be transmitting they would be easy to find. I'm sure the military would be happy with your hypothetical combat reporter dropping transmitting breadcrumbs telegraphaphing their positions and movements to the enemy. ;-)

 

BTW I can't speak highly enough of https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/ I've been a subscriber to his monthly Crypto-gram newsletter for years and it has been wonderfully educational as are his books. He's the author of one of the must read books on the topic Applied Cryptography https://www.schneier.com/books/applied_cryptography/ which collected together the highly distributed academic literature and best practices into a form which was consumable to practitioners such as myself.

[pico]

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Cop: "Let's see what you have in your camera."

Photog: "Film"

Cop: "WTF is film?"

[pico]

So what is the difference, encrypt the data within the transfer protocol or encrypt the data in the camera. It is still encryption just with a different user interface.

 

Also leaving little satellite upload modules along your path would provide valuable breadcrumbs leading to you and your potentially valuable data caches.

 

The difference is that the camera and transmitter could delete the originals once transmission is complete. Nothing on-hand to investigate.

 

Regarding leaving breadcrumbs, maybe they could make the transmitter out of the stuff that Toyota uses in many parts of their car - edible natural products so that vermin will destroy the transmitter like they eat the insulated wiring and seats of their cars.

Edited December 27, 2016 by pico

[Exodies]

Yes, and they could emit ultrasonic squeaks while they were transmitting to keep the vermin away until the job was done.

[josephparis]

I know I'm being late on the topic, but I think it is worth saying that the request of encrypted pictures is still relevant for some of us. Being back from a country at war I was able to experience this need quite strongly when the police deleted some of my pictures from my camera. I don't really blame them, I understand their position and the fact they perceive that any picture can raise a risk for the military. But the right to inform the public has to be defended in all circumstances, even those of war. Also, it is not easy to a police officer to understand that we too know what we do and that by the time the pictures will be published the military presence on them will be long gone.

Considering the history of the Leica brand in war photography, I think this is a subject that should be taken very seriously by its developers. Here are my suggestions:

- I think it is worth considering that as a first step, a full encryption protocol is not necessarily needed. In my case, I would have loved to be simply able to hide some pictures on the SD card, so when someone review the pictures from the camera they don't appear. In most cases it would be enough. You do not have to deal often with security services that would review every single file on your storage but much more often with a simple police officier that will review them directly from the camera and stop there.

- Another feature that I would appreciate a lot is the ability to automaticaly transfer pictures from the camera to my phone and from my phone to a cloud with the Leica fotos app. It would be very usefull not only to hide from the authorities but to secure our work from any bad event that could happen.

- Best of all, the combination of encryption with the two previous features would be a dream coming true. In this way you know your pictures are secured somewhere in the cloud, they could not have been intercepted by the enemy during the upload process, you didn't reveal any military position, everyone is safe and you can even format your SD card afterwards.

 

 

[jaapv]

And you are assuming the Cloud is safe? 

[josephparis]

For what I've experienced yes. Again, most of the time you deal with a simple policeman or military guy, not a whole governement agency that tries to break into your system.

[Anbaric]

I'm sure this is a genuine use case for this, but sometimes:

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[Simone_DF]

On 8/6/2022 at 10:56 PM, josephparis said:

For what I've experienced yes. Again, most of the time you deal with a simple policeman or military guy, not a whole governement agency that tries to break into your system.

I'd rather set up a NAS at home and upload there. For sensitive material, it's more secure than a cloud service. 

You can then encrypt and backup your NAS content on a glacier-style cloud service.

[Anbaric]

7 hours ago, Simone_DF said:

I'd rather set up a NAS at home and upload there. For sensitive material, it's more secure than a cloud service. 

You can then encrypt and backup your NAS content on a glacier-style cloud service.

First you have to get home, though. The photographers who see a need for this are people who often work in difficult or dangerous situations far from home. They're worried about what might happen while out in the field, when they might not have the option of moving their files somewhere secure in the normal way.

[Erato]

Draft 

2022-08-10 01:41 AM

It would be much easier to integrated an UUID/LUID subset with Adobe DNG SDK which may also included in the Metadata further.

Pros:

• limited system resources consumption of SoC
• Limited power consumption relatively
• No encrypt algorithm involved
• Less complexity and easy to rollout
• Hash or clash collisions reduction could be done by increasing(double) the canonical 8-4-4-4-12 format string is based on the record layout for the 16 bytes of the UUID.
  • The probability to find a duplicate within 103 trillion version-4 UUIDs is one in a billion on the following example

For instance, I've just created an UUID in a few nanosec via CLI shell script:

• UUID: B54677FE-C5B2-4D40-B255-AC32C5D0EF94

 

Leica User ID simulation practice:

• LUID: ACBB60EB-909F-4D2C-90A2-45663A835B3B

 

References:

1. RFC-4122 --Link  to the RFC
2. Wiki -- Link to the relevant Wiki here

 

See also:

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published the Standards-Track RFC 4122,[1] technically equivalent to ITU-T Rec. X.667 | ISO/IEC 9834-8.

 

Edited August 9, 2022 by Erato

[Simone_DF]

3 hours ago, Anbaric said:

First you have to get home, though. 

Why? All you need to move files to a NAS is an internet connection, then you can use a ftp app or even a browser.

Currently I'm abroad and I do back up all my photos daily. My NAS is sitting at about 2500km from my location.

[Anbaric]

24 minutes ago, Simone_DF said:

Why? All you need to move files to a NAS is an internet connection, then you can use a ftp app or even a browser.

Currently I'm abroad and I do back up all my photos daily. My NAS is sitting at about 2500km from my location.

Sorry, I misunderstood your setup. But I still don't think that would solve their fundamental problem - they want to protect images that are still on their cameras that they may not have been able to upload anywhere (or in some circumstances delete) because they haven't yet had the time or the net access. With encryption on the device, they may still lose their images if the equipment or media cards are confiscated or stolen, but at least they won't be available to anyone hostile unless they are prepared to use the '$5 wrench' method.

[djmay]

11 hours ago, Anbaric said:

 

If your intent is to protect the people or places in the photos, maybe you should travel with a small computer or storage device. The process would be:

1. Make the photos 

2. Immediately transfer the photos to the computer.

3. Encrypt the files on the computer, or encrypt the entire drive.

4. Delete the files from the camera/card.

It may be possible to encrypt a storage device in lieu of a computer; I do not know.

 I travel with a WD Wireless Pro to have a backup of my files. I have not looked to see if encryption is possible.

Edited August 10, 2022 by djmay

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