Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Like a bullet to a gun, scientists can match a photo to the phone that took it

By

phone security photo sensor smartphone authentication
Douglas Levere
You know that cop movie trope where a single bullet is traced back to the specific gun that fired it? Well, researchers at the University at Buffalo in New York have developed similar technology — only this time it’s for tracking a photo back to the phone that took it. It could potentially lead to a new way to enhance security and fight cybercrime.

“We have developed a hardware-based smartphone authentication system utilizing the camera fingerprint of modern smartphones,” Professor Kui Ren, the lead researcher involved in this work, told Digital Trends. “Using this system, a user can simply use her smartphone as a security token to protect her online account.”

Recommended Videos

The idea, essentially, is that every smartphone produces tiny microscopic imaging flaws whenever a photo is taken. This effect, called photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU), can be used like digital fingerprints as a unique identifier of a particular device. While PRNU has been known about for some time — it’s frequently used to determine authorship in copyright cases — until now it was thought that the analysis of dozens of photos was necessary to come up with a match. The University at Buffalo researchers, on the other hand, demonstrated that this analysis can be done with just one photo. In tests involving 16,000 images from 30 different iPhones and 10 Samsung Galaxy Note devices, their positive identification rate was 99.5 percent.

One way that this technology could be used would involve ensuring that the correct user is using a smartphone by analyzing photos as a security measure. That might mean asking a user to snap a quick photo of a QR code for analysis. While it wouldn’t necessarily be a replacement for current biometrics, it could be a useful extra layer of security.

“We hope our system can be put into practical use in the near future,” Ren continued. “There are a few issues before its mature real-world uses and performing large-scale experiments is one.” Ren said the team would next like to test their discovery using the dual camera system found on high-end smartphones. They also plan to investigate how support could be extended to cover other Internet of Things devices.

The research is due to be presented in February at the 2018 Network and Distributed Systems Security Conference in California.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Xiaomi’s new phone has a 200MP camera — and its photos are stunning
Holding the Xiaomi 12T Pro to take a photo.

There was a time when phones with 48-megapixel cameras sounded impressive, and when some of our favorite camera phones still “only” have 12 megapixels today. But for the new 12T Pro, Xiaomi has decided 12, 48, or even 108 megapixels isn’t the headline number it wants — and has therefore used Samsung’s ISOCELL HP1 200-megapixel camera instead.
Taking photos with a 200MP camera
Samsung announced the ISOCELL HP1 sensor in 2021, and the Xiaomi 12T Pro is the first phone to use it. There’s also plenty of speculation it may also be a major feature on the future Galaxy S23 smartphone range. Until now, we’ve only seen a massive photo of a cat teasing the camera’s ability, so what’s it like in real life?

Before we talk about the photos, you need to know the size of the 200MP photos taken by the Xiaomi 12T Pro. Yes, it is possible to shoot in maximum resolution, but by default, the camera takes 12MP photos using 4-into-1 pixel binning technology. Beware, though — the 200MP mode photos are massive. We’re talking 16,384 pixels by 12,288 pixels and, on average, about 55MB each. Tap the shutter button, and there is a slight pause while the photo is processed, but it’s not all that different from using the regular camera mode. The 200MP photos I’ve taken have a lovely balance, with vibrant colors and great exposure, and are sometimes even better looking than the equivalent 12MP photos taken by the phone.

Read more
The future of blood oxygen monitoring lies with your phone’s camera
Measuring SpO2 with smartphone camera and flash

Smartphones are already capable of some neat health-centric tricks. From step counting and sleep tracking to measuring pulse and respiration rate, the phone in your pocket is quite a powerful-health monitoring machine. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Washington is looking to add blood oxygen level measurement to that bag of tricks.

In a paper published inNJP Digital Medicine, the team details what it calls the “first clinical development validation on a smartphone camera-based SpO2 sensing system.” To put it simply, the team developed an algorithm and proved that smartphones could measure the blood oxygen saturation level to the same baseline level as approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for over-the-counter pulse oximeters.

Read more
Can the Nothing Phone 1’s new cameras beat a 2-year-old iPhone?
The cameras on the Nothing Phone 1 and iPhone 11.

It’s not that much of a stretch to see the Nothing Phone 1 would like to be the iPhone of the Android world, with its flat-sided design, clean software, a growing ecosystem of similar products, and the dual-camera layout on the back. But can it win over potential iPhone buyers, or steal them away from a reasonably priced iPhone? To find out, we put the Nothing Phone 1 against the most affordable competing iPhone Apple still sells, the iPhone 11.
The phones and cameras
Before we get into the photos, let's talk about the choice of iPhone. The Nothing Phone 1 starts at 400 British pounds, or about $480. For this, it has a midrange processor, a large 6.55-inch screen, and a dual camera on the back. While the iPhone SE (2022) comes in around the same price, it’s not exactly comparable in specification, and the latest iPhone 13 costs $800 or 780 pounds. While it’s closer in spec, it’s considerably more money to buy.

To get the equivalent modern iPhone that’s sold brand-new, we need to go back in time a little. Apple still sells the iPhone 12 new for $599 or 679 pounds, which is still a little too expensive, but at $499 or 489 pounds, the iPhone 11 is just about right. After all, the top Nothing Phone 1 with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage space costs 499 pounds, or about $590. If you’ve got $500 maximum to spend on a big-screen smartphone, the iPhone 11 is probably going to be on the list alongside the Nothing Phone 1.

Read more