this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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The only other way to combat deep fakes is something that people and companies constantly fuck up: cryptography.
Or, alternatively, just showing up to do stuff in person. Of course that's not always feasible but still.
Yeah, it really shouldn't be hard to digitally sign a video along with a number of the frames. We've had the tech for decades.
We're starting to see it in some cameras, mostly for still photography, but I don't see why the basic concept wouldn't extend to video files, too. Leica released a camera last year that signs the photo, including the timestamp and location data, and Canon, Nikon, Sony, Adobe, and Getty have various implementations of the technique.
Once the major photo software editing workflows support it, we'll probably see some kind of chain of custody authentication support from camera to publication.
Of course, that doesn't prevent fakes in the sense of staged productions, but the timestamp and location data would go a long way.
But then what? So you have a camera signing its files and we pretend that extraction of the secret key is impossible (which it probably isn't). You load the file into your editing program because usually, the source files are processed further. You create a derivative of the signed file and there's no connection to the old signature anymore, so this would only make sense if you provide the original file for verification purposes, which most people won't do.
I guess it's better than nothing but it will require more infrastructure to turn it into something usable, or of this was only used in important situations where manual checking isn't an issue, like a newspaper posting a picture but keeping the original to verify the authenticity.
Also at least last time I heard about these cameras, only specific proprietary editors (like Adobe) were compatible, which introduces all sorts of other problems.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm imagining. You're keeping receipts for after-the-fact proof, in case it needs to be audited. If you have a newsworthy photograph, or evidence that needs to be presented to the court system, this could provide an important method of proving an untampered original.
Maybe a central trusted authority can verify the signatures and generate a thumbnail for verification (take the signed photo and put it through an established, open source, destructive algorithm to punch out a 200x300 lossy compressed jpeg that at least confirms that the approximate photo was taken at that time and place, but without sufficient resolution/bit depth to compete with the original author on postprocessing.