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Advisorygoogle-security-pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials-eb0d883ae789

How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials

Posted by Eric Lynch, Senior Product Manager, Android Security, and Sherif Hanna, Group Product Manager, Google C2PA Core At Made by Google 2025, we announced that the new Google Pixel 10 phones will support C2PA Content Credentials in Pixel Camera and Google Photos .

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At a glance

Sources
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What to do

Read the exact official research article before applying its defensive techniques or drawing conclusions.

Read Google Security Research: How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials (opens a new tab)

What happened

Posted by Eric Lynch, Senior Product Manager, Android Security, and Sherif Hanna, Group Product Manager, Google C2PA Core

At Made by Google 2025, we announced that the new Google Pixel 10 phones will support C2PA Content Credentials in Pixel Camera and Google Photos . This announcement represents a series of steps towards greater digital media transparency:

The Pixel 10 lineup is the first to have Content Credentials built in across every photo created by Pixel Camera.

The Pixel Camera app achieved Assurance Level 2 , the highest security rating currently defined by the C2PA Conformance Program. Assurance Level 2 for a mobile app is currently only possible on the Android platform .

Continue reading

A private-by-design approach to C2PA certificate management, where no image or group of images can be related to one another or the person who created them.

Pixel 10 phones support on-device trusted time-stamps, which ensures images captured with your native camera app can be trusted after the certificate expires, even if they were captured when your device was offline.

These capabilities are powered by Google Tensor G5 , Titan M2 security chip, the advanced hardware-backed security features of the Android platform, and Pixel engineering expertise.

In this post, we’ll break down our architectural blueprint for bringing a new level of trust to digital media, and how developers can apply this model to their own apps on Android.

A New Approach to Content Credentials

Generative AI can help us all to be more creative, productive, and innovative. But it can be hard to tell the difference between content that’s been AI-generated, and content created without AI. The ability to verify the source and history—or provenance—of digital content is more important than ever.

Content Credentials convey a rich set of information about how media such as images, videos, or audio files were made, protected by the same digital signature technology that has secured online transactions and mobile apps for decades. It empowers users to identify AI-generated (or altered) content, helping to foster transparency and trust in generative AI. It can be complemented by watermarking technologies such as SynthID .

Content Credentials are an industry standard backed by a broad coalition of leading companies for securely conveying the origin and history of media files. The standard is developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), of which Google is a steering committee member.

The traditional approach to classifying digital image content has focused on categorizing content as “AI” vs. “not AI”. This has been the basis for many legislative efforts , which have required the labeling of synthetic media. This traditional approach has drawbacks, as described in Chapter 5 of this seminal report by Google.

Research shows that if only synthetic content is labeled as “AI”, then users falsely believe unlabeled content is “not AI”, a phenomenon called “the implied truth effect”. This is why Google is taking a different approach to applying C2PA Content Credentials.

Instead of categorizing digital content into a simplistic “AI” vs. “not AI”, Pixel 10 takes the first steps toward implementing our vision of categorizing digital content as either i) media that comes with verifiable proof of how it was made or ii) media that doesn't.

Pixel Camera attaches Content Credentials to any JPEG photo capture, with the appropriate description as defined by the Content Credentials specification for each capture mode.

Google Photos attaches Content Credentials to JPEG images that already have Content Credentials and are edited using AI or non-AI tools, and also to any images that are edited using AI tools. It will validate and display Content Credentials under a new section in the About panel, if the JPEG image being viewed contains this data. Learn more about it in Google Photos Help .

Given the broad range of scenarios in which Content Credentials are attached by these apps, we designed our C2PA implementation architecture from the onset to be:

Secure from silicon to applications

Verifiable, not personally identifiable

Useable offline

Secure from Silicon to Applications

Good actors in the C2PA ecosystem are motivated to ensure that provenance data is trustworthy. C2PA Certification Authorities (CAs), such as Google, are incentivized to only issue certificates to genuine instances of apps from trusted developers in order to prevent bad actors from undermining the system. Similarly, app developers want to protect their C2PA claim signing keys from unauthorized use.

And of course, users want assurance that the media files they rely on come from where they claim. For these reasons, the C2PA defined the Conformance Program.

The Pixel Camera application on the Pixel 10 lineup has achieved Assurance Level 2 , the highest security rating currently defined by the C2PA Conformance Program. This was made possible by a strong set of hardware-backed technologies, including Tensor G5 and the certified Titan M2 security chip, along with Android’s hardware-backed security APIs.

Only mobile apps running on devices that have the necessary silicon features and Android APIs can be designed to achieve this assurance level. We are working with C2PA to help define future assurance levels that will push protections even deeper into hardware.

Achieving Assurance Level 2 requires verifiable, difficult-to-forge evidence. Google has built an end-to-end system on Pixel 10 devices that verifies several key attributes. However, the security of any claim is fundamentally dependent on the integrity of the application and the OS, an integrity that relies on both being kept current with the latest security patches.

Hardware Trust: Android Key Attestation in Pixel 10 is built on support for Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE) by Tensor, and Remote Key Provisioning (RKP) to establish a trust chain from the moment the device starts up to the OS, stamping out the most common forms of abuse on Android.

Genuine Device and Software: Aided by the hardware trust described above, Android Key Attestation allows Google C2PA Certification Authorities (CAs) to verify that they are communicating with a genuine physical device. It also allows them to verify the device has booted securely into a Play Protect Certified version of Android , and verify how recently the operating system, bootloader, and system software and firmware were patched for security vulnerabilities.

Genuine Application: Hardware-backed Android Key Attestation certificates include the package name and signing certificates associated with the app that requested the generation of the C2PA signing key, allowing Google C2PA CAs to check that the app requesting C2PA claim signing certificates is a trusted, registered app.

Tamper-Resistant Key Storage: On Pixel, C2PA claim signing keys are generated and stored using Android StrongBox in the Titan M2 security chip. Titan M2 is Common Criteria PP.0084 AVA_VAN.5 certified , meaning that it is strongly resistant to extracting or tampering with the cryptographic keys stored in it.

Android Key Attestation allows Google C2PA CAs to verify that private keys were indeed created inside this hardware-protected vault before issuing certificates for their public key counterparts.

The C2PA Conformance Program requires verifiable artifacts backed by a hardware Root of Trust, which Android provides through features like Key Attestation. This means Android developers can leverage these same tools to build apps that meet this standard for their users.

Privacy Built on a Foundation of Trust: Verifiable, Not Personally Identifiable

The robust security stack we described is the foundation of privacy. But Google takes steps further to ensure your privacy even as you use Content Credentials, which required solving two additional challenges:

Challenge 1: Server-side Processing of Certificate Re

Related technology

Sources

  1. Primary source

    Google Security Research: How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials (opens a new tab)

    Exact official article/advisory identified by the feed; title, source dates, and any supplied article excerpt.

    Published Checked

  2. Primary source

    Google Security Research syndication feed (opens a new tab)

    The RSS/Atom/RDF entry supplied this exact link and any available title, date, and excerpt.

    Published Date not suppliedChecked

Cite this record

For factual claims, cite the primary sources above; cite KEVWire for its compilation, dates, and classifications.

APA

KEVWire. (2025, September 10). How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials. https://kevwire.com/record/google-security-pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials-eb0d883ae789

MLA

"How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials." KEVWire, 10 Sept. 2025, kevwire.com/record/google-security-pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials-eb0d883ae789.

Chicago

KEVWire. "How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials." Last modified September 10, 2025. https://kevwire.com/record/google-security-pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials-eb0d883ae789.

Evidence summary (plain text)

How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials (Sep 10, 2025).
Posted by Eric Lynch, Senior Product Manager, Android Security, and Sherif Hanna, Group Product Manager, Google C2PA Core 

At Made by Google 2025, we announced that the new Google Pixel 10 phones will support C2PA Content Credentials in Pixel Camera and Google Photos . This announcement represents a series of steps towards greater digital media transparency:

 The Pixel 10 lineup is the first to have Content Credentials built in across every photo created by Pixel Camera.

 The Pixel Camera app achieved Assurance Level 2 , the highest security rating currently defined by the C2PA Conformance Program. Assurance Level 2 for a mobile app is currently only possible on the Android platform .

 A private-by-design approach to C2PA certificate management, where no image or group of images can be related to one another or the person who created them.

 Pixel 10 phones support on-device trusted time-stamps, which ensures images captured with your native camera app can be trusted after the certificate expires, even if they were captured when your device was offline.

These capabilities are powered by Google Tensor G5 , Titan M2 security chip, the advanced hardware-backed security features of the Android platform, and Pixel engineering expertise. 

In this post, we’ll break down our architectural blueprint for bringing a new level of trust to digital media, and how developers can apply this model to their own apps on Android.

 A New Approach to Content Credentials 

Generative AI can help us all to be more creative, productive, and innovative. But it can be hard to tell the difference between content that’s been AI-generated, and content created without AI. The ability to verify the source and history—or provenance—of digital content is more important than ever.

Content Credentials convey a rich set of information about how media such as images, videos, or audio files were made, protected by the same digital signature technology that has secured online transactions and mobi
Sources:
Google Security Research: How Pixel and Android are bringing a new level of trust to your images with C2PA Content Credentials: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials.html
Google Security Research syndication feed: https://security.googleblog.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&redirect=false&max-results=50
Record ID: google-security-pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials-eb0d883ae789.
Record origin: Ingested record.
AI evidence: Not assessed.
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This record was ingested from a data source. Retrieved: Oct 26, 2026, 21:35 UTC. Ingestion is not an independent editorial investigation.

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