The White House wants to ‘cryptographically verify’ videos of Joe Biden so viewers don’t mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden’s AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is “in the works.”
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
- if you edit the signature, the trust chain will fail validation
- if you edit other data, the signed checksum would not match and validation would fail
- if you edit the checksum, the key would no longer match and validation would fail
It’s actually been a lot of years, so I hope I’m remembering it accurately
