This article has been indexed from MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors – Front Page
Apple today announced that with the launch of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, it will begin scanning iCloud Photos in the U.S. to look for known Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), with plans to report the findings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Prior to when Apple detailed its plans, news of the CSAM initiative leaked, and security researchers have already begun expressing concerns about how Apple’s new image scanning protocol could be used in the future, as noted by Financial Times.
Apple is using a “NeuralHash” system to compare known CSAM images to photos on a user’s iPhone before they’re uploaded to iCloud. If there is a match, that photograph is uploaded with a cryptographic safety voucher, and at a certain threshold, a review is triggered to check if the person has CSAM on their devices.
At the current time, Apple is using its image scanning and matching technology to look for child abuse, but researchers worry that in the future, it could be adapted to scan for other kinds of imagery that are more concerning, like anti-government signs at protests.
In a series of tweets, Johns Hopkins cryptography researcher Matthew Green said that CSAM scanning is a “really bad idea” because in the future, it could expand to scanning end-to-end encrypted photos rather than just content that’s uploaded to iCloud. For children, Apple is implementing a separate scanning feature that looks for sexually explicit content directly in iMessages, which are end-to-end encrypted.
Green also raised concerns over the hashes that Apple plans to use because there could potentially be “collisions,” where someone sends a harmless file that shares a hash with CSAM and could result in a false fla
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Read the original article: Security Researchers Express Alarm Over Apple’s Plans to Scan iCloud Images, But Practice Already Widespread