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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Imho this is a good product, but wouldn’t it make more sense to simply sign videos cryptographically?

Unfakeable and unbeatable.

So someone uploads a video, you sign it, they display video. If authenticity is in question check the signature.

Deep fake detection is intractable imo. Use cryptography instead.

Hell if you want to be thorough sign each frame and create an extension for YouTube and other providers to literally check to see if a given frame or period was altered.

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Most videos people watch nowadays don't come from "official" authorities, whose public keys are known and signatures can be verified. When videos are recorded by random people from their smartphones, what signature are you going to verify?

Even if smartphone manufacturers start integrating digital signatures right into their cameras, you can use the smartphone to re-record a pre-recorded fake video. And I'm sure that with enough resources you can do something way more clever.

I really don't see how crypto can solve this problem. I don't think AI can either (for reasons already mentioned in this thread). It's something we'll have to learn to live with.

> Most videos people watch nowadays don't come from "official" authorities

I doubt this is true. Most videos are likely disseminated from a handful of companies.

> Even if smartphone manufacturers start integrating digital signatures right into their cameras, you can use the smartphone to re-record a pre-recorded fake video. And I'm sure that with enough resources you can do something way more clever.

Even if a fake video was re recorded it would have a different signature than the “original”. Problem solved.

Literally cryptography is the only solution

" you can use the smartphone to re-record a pre-recorded fake video."

I assume the intent is not to store solely a direct hash of the original video, but also the original file which can be fingerprinted, or the fingerprint itself that will be matched if a later duplicate is uploaded.

Fingerprint differing from hashing in that two non-identical, but similar files (e.g. an original video and deepfake) can have the same fingerprint, but differing checksums.

We’re fascinated by the potential applications of crypto in content provenance. In this example, a UGC video platform would need a way to initially determine the content hasn’t been manipulated before it’s signed, right? What about a live scenario where a deepfake mimicking an exec calls a manager to wire $10M (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/14/huge-...)

We totally recognize deepfake detection is a big & constantly evolving challenge, but we don't see that as a reason to cede the truth to bad actors :)

> "We’re fascinated by the potential applications of crypto in content provenance. In"

@bpcrd what's the advantage of using a block-chain to store video fingerprints, to determine provenance, over say a highly performance-optimized immutable centralized or federated system?

There are advantages to both, as well as using existing blockchains (Ie. Bitcoin) to record small amounts of information via Merkle Trees.

Fun fact: The oldest blockchain pre-dates bitcoin....and started in the 1990's in the New York Times classified via a daily recorded hash value!

https://crypto.news/finding-the-oldest-blockchain-in-the-new...

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