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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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A note on this. There are other videos that will hash to the same value as a legitimate video. Finding one that is coherent is extraordinarily difficult. Maybe a state actor could do it?
But for practical purposes, it'll do the job. Hell, if a doctored video with the same hash comes out, the White House could just say no, we punished this one, and that alone would be remarkable.
This concept is known as ‘collision’ in cryptography. While technically true for weaker key sizes, there are entire fields of mathematics dedicated to probably ensuring collisions are cosmically unlikely. MD5 and SHA-1 have a small enough key space for collisions to be intentionally generated in a reasonable timeframe, which is why they have been deprecated for several years.
To my knowledge, SHA-2 with sufficiently large key size (2048) is still okay within the scope of modern computing, but beyond that, you’ll want to use Dilithium or Kyber CRYSTALS for quantum resistance.
SHA family and MD5 do not have keys. SHA1 and MD5 are insecure due to structural weaknesses in the algorithm.
Also, 2048 bits apply to RSA asymmetric keypairs, but SHA1 is 160 bits with similarly sized internal state and SHA256 is as the name says 256 bits.
ECC is a public key algorithm which can have 256 bit keys.
Dilithium is indeed a post quantum digital signature algorithm, which would replace ECC and RSA. But you'd use it WITH a SHA256 hash (or SHA3).
Good catch, and appreciate the additional info!