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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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I'm more interested in how exactly you'd implement something like this.
It's not like videos viewed on tiktok display a hash for the file you're viewing; and users wouldn't look at that data anyway, especially those that would be swayed by a deep fake...
Like you said, the issue is in verification by the end-user. It is trivial to provide a digitally signed (and timestamped) file. It is also trivial to provide trusted tools to verify these files. It is immensely difficult to provide a solution user will care about; which is why more often than not the most people asks companies in the data authenticity business is "can we show a green check on screen? That would be perfect!".
And we end up with something that nobody checks beyond the "it's probably ok" phase. If the goal is to teach the masses about trusting their source, either they have a miracle solution, or it just won't work. (and all that is assuming people actually care about checking the authenticity of the stuff they see, which is not a norm as it is…)
Likely it would be a service provided by the Whitehouse press corps and media outlets then could rehost the videos with the whitehouse watermark
Digital signature. A watermark may be useful so that an unauthorized user can’t easily hide their source without noticeably defacing the photo, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from modifying it
A digital signature is a somewhat similar idea except that signature verification fails if there are any changes. This is tough to do with a photograph, where some applications may be blindly re-encoding or modifying the resolution so those may need to be fixed.
You could argue this is a good use case for blockchain, certainly much better than those stupid monkey images. When John Stewart parodies a politician, there should be a verifiable chain of evidence from the White House release to the news bureau to his studio, before they alter the lighting to highlight orange skin tone for yucks.
The question is how does the USER verify the authenticity. They just see a video, not a signature.
They shouldn’t have to actively verify that, but yeah, I don’t know if there is a relevant file format though
I once worked with signed xml, where the signature field is really no different than any other field, but with binary data. That data used a private key to sign a checksum if the file. For tools that understand the format, you just verify the trust chain against cert authority public keys using your local keystore. It just worked, with no action required of the user and no internet required
It’s actually been a lot of years, so I hope I’m remembering it accurately