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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 is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Digital signature as a means of non repudiation is exactly the way this should be done. Any official docs or releases should be signed and easily verifiable by any public official.
i wouldn’t say signature exactly, because that ensures that a video hasn’t been altered in any way: no re-encoded, resized, cropped, trimmed, etc… platforms almost always do some of these things to videos, even if it’s not noticeable to the end-user
there are perceptual hashes, but i’m not sure if they work in a way that covers all those things or if they’re secure hashes. i would assume not
perhaps platforms would read the metadata in a video for a signature and have to serve the video entirely unaltered if it’s there?
Rather that using a hash of the video data, you could just include within the video the timestamp of when it was originally posted, encrypted with the White House’s private key.
That doesn't prove that the data outside the timestamp is unmodified
It does if you can also verify the date of the file, because the modified file will be newer than the timestamp. An immutable record of when the file was first posted (on, say, YouTube) lets you verify which version is the source.
No it does not because you can cut out the timestamp and put it into anything if the timestamp doesn't encode anything about the frame contents.
It is always possible to backdate file edits.
Sure, public digital timestamping services exists, but most people will not check. Also once again, an older timestamp can simply be cut out of one file and posted into another file.
You absolutely must embedd something which identifies what the media file is, which can be used to verify ALL of the contents with cryptographic signatures. This may additionally refer to a verifiable timestamp at some timestamping service.