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The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Maybe the White House should create a hash of the video and add it to a public blockchain. Anyone can then verify if the video is authentic.
Don’t need to involve a blockchain to make cryptographically provable authenticity. Just a digital signature.
The only thing a hash in a blockchain would add is proof the video existed at the time the hash was added to the blockchain. I can think of cases where that would be beneficial too, but it wouldn’t make sense to put a hash of every video on a public blockchain.
Transparency logs like that are helpful to show when media was first seen / published
Blockchain is the opposite of what you want for this problem, I'm not sure why people bring this up now. People need to take an introductory cryptography course before saying to use blockchain everywhere.
Putting it on the blockchain ensures you can always go back and say "see, at this date/time, this key verified this file/hash".. If you know the key of the uploader (the white house), you can verify it was signed by that key. Guatemala used a similar scheme to verify votes in elections using Bitcoin. Could the precinct lie and put in the wrong vote count? Of course! But what it prevented was somebody saying "well actually the precinct reported a different number" since anybody could verify that on chain they didn't. It also prevented the precinct themselves from changing the number in the future if they were put under some kind of pressure.
All of this could be done without blockchain. Once they sign a signature with their private key they can't unsign it later. Once you attest something you cannot un-attest it.
Just make the public key known and sign things. Please stop shoehorning blockchain where it doesn't belong, especially when you aren't even giving any examples of things that blockchain is doing for you with 100000x the cost and complexity, that normal crypto from the 80s/90s cant do better.
Trusted timestamping protocols and transparency logs exists and does that more efficiently
Wouldn't this be defeated by people re-uploading the video? I think all these sites will re-encode the videos uploaded so the hash will not match, then people will use that as proof that the video is not real.
There are many unnecessary steps in that.
Guys, it doesn't need to be on a block chain. Asymmetric key cryptography is enought to verify authenticity.