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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

That's not how I read the article. This bit from right near the beginning explains why he's interested in more than what https provides:

If I call https://api.example.com/?id=123 myself, then I can be reasonably sure that the data has come from the server unaltered.

But what if someone emails me a JSON file? Or someone re-hosts an XML dump? Or a hacker claims to have uncovered proof of...?

As data-journalism gathers pace, it's vital to be able to see whether data is authentic.

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How do I know your comment is legit if you didn't sign it? What is special about APIs?

Sign all the things!

But for real.

I had an idea a while back: with all the photo/audio/video manipulation and ‘deep fakes’, there should be a certification available that accompanies (very expensive) cameras/recorders with protected firmware that signs each and every raw frame/recording, so the original is always available upon request from any type of inquiry or investigation.

Sounds like an invasion of privacy. Your personal pictures and videos shouldn’t have a unique digital signature so the police or a bad actor can identify which device it was taken on.

This seems like a good idea at first but what about whistleblowers or informants?

Wouldn't have to tie it back to you. It would be enough to say "Canon affirms this photo was taken directly on a model X". Which would then tell you that this was the unedited photo and could be trusted.

> Sounds like an invasion of privacy. Your personal pictures and videos shouldn’t have a unique digital signature so the police or a bad actor can identify which device it was taken on.

You've misunderstood the point. The goal is not to identify users. The goal is to sign messages to ensure they were actually outputted by a service.

You mean like how it's done with printers? https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

This is not the solution for this essentially unsolvable problem. It offers a false sense of assurance since there will undoubtedly be ways of extracting the signature apparatus and then using it to produce fake signatures. It also creates a dangerous opportunity for all kinds of authoritarian actors to inject tracking and identifying information in digital artefacts.

It's much less painful to abandon the idea that photographs, videos and sound can be ultimately trusted.

Nikon had something like this (the "Image Authentication System", which used a builtin key to sign the images) but somebody managed to pull the signing key off the camera:

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...

Same thing happened with Canon's implementation the year before.

Thanks!

I figured it had already been tried.

I wonder if it can still be done.

> "How do I know your comment is legit if you didn't sign it?"

The comment is fake. The points in it are valid, though.

The big difference here is whether a comment or API response is claiming any kind of authority over certain data, or is a self-contained argument where the validity doesn't depend on where it comes from.

Then this new technology might be useful

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exc...

It's part of a family of technologies developed by Google to rehost AMP pages without losing the origin.

Digging themselves out of problems that didn't need to exist. They could have just penalised fat pages.

While I agree with your point, and think AMP should not need to exist, Signed HTTP exchange might actually be great for other types of very cheap, dumb caches or CDNs that only have to rehost one file to cache a page, and not even serve it through SSL.

I know I might use it as a web designer to send interactive snapshots of how the website currently looks/works to the client; instead of using an ephemeral URL and a tunnelling/proxy service.

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