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Comment by falcon620 | Hacker News Reader

I really like this idea. Every video frame from a political/public personality is cryptographically signed with their private key and edge viewing devices are able to tell if it's properly signed or not.

It's easy to imagine this idea becoming a part of video (be it VOD or broadcast) encoding standards in the future, once this becomes a critical thing.

In terms of UX: one could imagine a simple indication on TVs: an RGB led that shines in different colors depending on verified authenticity levels.

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Most of the shocking, status-quo challenging videos these days are cell-phone videos taken by bystanders. Those videos are how we find out about police brutality and other abuses by authorities.

I don't see how this video signing system will help verify a cell phone video taken by a random bystander.

Well, no, it won't.

It will however make sure that you're watching actual Obama 2, and not some computer simulation of him doing some disgusting thing.

Sensor supplier could embed the crypto in the hardware as close to the imager as possible and issue signing keys for each device. OEM would write firmware to extract that from the camera bitstream and dump it into the metadata of the image (something along those lines anyway)

The image and signature could be added as authentication layers and then a third layer added to allow post-production (crop/levels/etc). Right click in your browser to 'see original image' with a little padlock in the corner. Ideally this would include GPS info to reduce likelihood that someone would just project a desired image on a screen and photograph that.

That assumes a lot of trust in OEM providers, and there would be a lot of incentive to compromise the key.

Agreed. Nothing is foolproof. It would make it harder for Joe Sixpack to spoof images, I guess the question is whether or not that's better.

Yeah, joe six pack is not the one I am worried about. Nation states are.

Sounds like DRM. Also, it wouldn't be too hard for the people who actually want to hack it.

Yes, this is terrible. We're going back to the "dark ages" when a horrendous crime could happen in broad daylight around multiple witnesses and nobody would be found or sentenced.

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