Entities like CFOs and political leaders will have to start cryptographically signing their statements. There is no practical way to detect fakes after the fact.
For example, when watching a video on YouTube containing a speech by the president (provided on an official channel like the White House's), there should be a clear indication that the video has a digital signature and the option to verify it on an independent government website.
Adding signature after recording works to certain degree, but it still does not guarantee that the content is what the camera saw.
Cameras can record screens.
Perhaps adding a signed channel for depth and/or non-visible light would be the next step.
You're pushing a (bad) technical solution to a social problem.
Cameras that cryptographically sign their output will not solve anything. The idea has more flaws than it's possible to list, but here's a big one: do you really think a technological gimmick like that would stand up to a nation state? Do you really think the CIA, NSA, FSB, Chinese Ministry of State Security, etc. will not be able to sign whatever the hell image they want with a camera's signature?
Or you could just smear some Vaseline on the lens and tell people the lens got dirty. It hurts the credibility for anyone who knows about these cameras but I doubt the public would think about it that much.
Also, how to protect a chip from reverse engineering even from all except "top actors"? I remember the price for reverse engineering of certain ICs was between 5 and 7 figures of USD. Don't know about modern IC processes, but it may be affordable for many even for those?
I don't know audio well enough how it happens there. But potentially it can be signed in chunks as well.
Of course, one needs to consider risks if editing can make content appear different than originally intended, when the video as "whole" is not signed. But for that, different entity can be used again.
It would require completely changing how software currently handles video editing in short.
At the beginning, camera manufacturers might need to provide their own editors, to make editing possible. How much we can trust the camera holders, if the editor software even allows using the key from the camera for better editing in certain limits?
If you just cut away to the original clip and didn't have any modifications like motion graphics over the top of it you could in theory pass through the original video with the same compression and signing without too much drama but any modifications over that or presenting it as picture in picture would be a big difference as now you need to have both the original frames with the added graphics on top.
Does that really matter? You could sign keyframes, and then also sign the differences frame by frame til you get to the next keyframe.
The answer is that it doesn't. Some might try to make it work by using proprietary video editing software that signs a ledger of what edit operations were performed, or something like that, but that doesn't work. The signing keys will eventually be extracted from the video editor or the camera, or the video editor or camera will be hacked to sign something it shouldn't. You might say that this at least stops low-skilled attackers, but the misinformation that is most dangerous to humanity, that created by governments to start wars, won't be impeded by any of these schemes. The whole cryptographic signature proposal is worse than useless.
I wonder if you could use the camera to record deepfaked video and in effect bless a lie. Even just filming a TV set might be enough for low grade blackmail and much more complicated methods are available.
But even hardware can be hacked/bypassed if the effort is worth it.
For example the whitehouse is known to revise the text of the president’s speeches when he says the wrong thing. If we only have officially released videos where the gaffes and fables are left out, how is anyone to know what he actually said?
The biggest risk IMO is that key becomes immediately one of the most important secrets to keep since it holds the promise of validating anything you want to lie about.
I mean, what is new to this problem. Other than it is somewhat cheaper to pair the fake statement with the person responsible reading it out laud.
Department press release -> Reuters -> News paper -> reader
No signing required. The reader can verify the press release of he wants to.
One could argue that this will be a good thing because deep fakes will be so prevalent (e.g. kids making videos of their parents saying and doing funny things) that the default assumption is that everything is fake until proven not fake.
Thanks to a businessman/politician who turned "news about me I don't like" into "fake news", we got a jump start on that.
This is what it's like living under an authoritarian government. "Of course the government is lying", "Of course the politician is lying", "Of course my neighbor is lying", "Of course the company is providing me with a fraudulent product"
This eventually turns into a kind of learned helplessness and is how you create a crapsack nation/world. "Everything is bad, so there is no reason I should do anything good"
I can promise you that you won't enjoy this world we're creating if you don't live in an authoritarian shithole already.
Also, official channels get hacked too.
* Text: You have little (definitive) clue who wrote what. You essentially have to ask the (apparent) writer.
* Photo: You used to have high confidence that a picture shows who appears to be shown. Not 100%, sure, but it's high.
* Video & Audio: You used to have very high confidence that the video including its audio are genuine. It was very difficult to replace video and/or audio.
Nowadays, none is trustworthy by default anymore. You can say: Well, just trust the company or Reuters. Sure, but I don't think anyone cares about this case. It's not controversial. But how will they be able to verify controversial sources?
If they get sent a video claiming to be about Ukrainins killing civilians, and outfits & speech matching that, how can Reuters be sure about anything now? Trust can't be given to the source, nor to the video, nor to the audio, nor to the metadata.
If a CFO makes a statement and that is on the company's website we can have reasonable confidence that the CFO made that statement and we can act on it.
Reporting on a video of unknown (possibly unknowable) provenance is a different kettle of fish.
Example - Dictator A says terrible things on video/audio. Of course it's not going to be shown on their nations' broadcast website or in media.
How can the rest of the world make sure the video that was recorded is trustworthy?
A network of trusted sources, reporters and newspapers that the public trusts. Eye witness accounts, a preponderance of evidence.
Basically it boils down to the reputation of the individuals involved in the chain of trust.
Personally I'm excited by the prospect that we might get mainstream investigative journalism back in some form.
I don’t agree. Many important photos don’t show what we think they do.
The Soviet flag on The Reichstag. When it was taken and what it showed are different to the impression you get looking at the photo. It was taken after the event and the signs of looting were removed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reic...
The flag raising on Iwo Jima was the second flag raised that day. It’s not quite the same once you know that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_on_Iwo_Jima
The famous ‘Falling Soldier’ photo from the Spanish Civil War is now thought to have been faked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Soldier
There are bound to be loads more, and the faking goes way back. The US Civil War has examples where bodies were dragged around and made more dramatic. Added cannon balls in Crimean War photos etc.
Perhaps that is a good thing. Maybe this is a good excuse to stop and consider multiple news outlets, even if it conflicts with our own opinions, for our news sources.
The thing about FoF is it gets people to stop believing anything which is very effective for bad actors and far less useful for good actors.
The physical artifacts yes, but not the narrative they were portraying. The “news” media has been spinning fictional narratives with physically authentic video and audio for a long time.
Think back to the Nixon watergate scandal. When the reporters were going to press about that, they made damn sure it was 100% real first. By interviewing varying sources, human trust, etc.
All that really changes is they can't take video and audio evidence as fact anymore. So they have to, in essence, audit the video/audio trail, so they will want to talk to the person that filmed it, make sure the story holds up, etc.
Some technology changes can help with authenticity here, but it's not really a technical problem, it's a human trust problem.
There will be learning curves and maybe one or two of the currently well known and trusted news sources totally burn their brand because they didn't do their homework. Nothing really new though.
Don't roll your own authentication.
I guess that is not a new problem either with lying newspapers.
Which it won’t. Eventually might be relevant when in a context where someone actually stops and spends time looking at evidence (civil and criminal court cases perhaps?) but those already use chain of custody for evidence because evidence has already been easy to fake for… well forever.
Still should be done IMO though, as it’s cheap and easy and will hopefully make it a little harder (or easier to detect) to do mass faking in the ‘middle’ - like fake IDs for online services, fake blackmail photos, etc.
The loss of truth is a serious thing for a society. (Yes, back in the Walter Cronkite days we had less truth than we thought we did. We had more agreed-upon truth that matched reality than we do today, though, and I think the difference matters.)