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.”
Wait. Did the White House just discover a legitimate use-case for NFTs?
No, all you need for this is a digital signature and to publish the public key on an official government website. And maybe for platforms like YouTube and TikTok to integrate check status in their UI (e.g. flag any footage of candidates that was not signed by the government private key as “unverified”).
How would an NFT help in any way?
Maybe the White House should create a hash of the video and add it to a public blockchain. Anyone can then verify if the video is authentic.
- Anybody can also verify it if they just host the hash on their own website, or host the video itself.
- Getting the general populace to understand block chain implementations or how to interface with it is an unrealistic task
- What does a distributed zero trust model add to something that is inherently centralized requiring trust in only 1 party
Blockchain is the opposite of what you want for this problem, I’m not sure why people bring this up now. People need to take an introductory cryptography course before saying to use blockchain everywhere.
Putting it on the blockchain ensures you can always go back and say “see, at this date/time, this key verified this file/hash”… If you know the key of the uploader (the white house), you can verify it was signed by that key. Guatemala used a similar scheme to verify votes in elections using Bitcoin. Could the precinct lie and put in the wrong vote count? Of course! But what it prevented was somebody saying “well actually the precinct reported a different number” since anybody could verify that on chain they didn’t. It also prevented the precinct themselves from changing the number in the future if they were put under some kind of pressure.
All of this could be done without blockchain. Once they sign a signature with their private key they can’t unsign it later. Once you attest something you cannot un-attest it.
Just make the public key known and sign things. Please stop shoehorning blockchain where it doesn’t belong, especially when you aren’t even giving any examples of things that blockchain is doing for you with 100000x the cost and complexity, that normal crypto from the 80s/90s cant do better.
Don’t need to involve a blockchain to make cryptographically provable authenticity. Just a digital signature.
The only thing a hash in a blockchain would add is proof the video existed at the time the hash was added to the blockchain. I can think of cases where that would be beneficial too, but it wouldn’t make sense to put a hash of every video on a public blockchain.
I mean they could just create a highly-secure official Fediverse server/account?
Just because you’re writing this on the fediverse doesn’t mean it’s the answer to everything. It’s certainly not the answer to this.
A link to the video could be shared via ActivityPub.
The video would be loaded over HTTPS; we can verify that the video is from the white house, and that it hasn’t been modified in-transit.
A big issue is that places don’t want to share a link to an independently verifiable video, they want you to load a copy of it from their website/app. This way we build trust with the brand (e.g. New York Times), and spend more time looking at ads or subscribe.
@stockRot @technology
A big issue is that places don’t want to share a link to an independently verifiable video, they want you to load a copy of it from their website/app.
Exactly. This “solution” doesn’t take into account how people actually use the Internet. Unless we expect billions of people to change their behavior, this is just a pointless comment.
I’m sure they do. AI regulation probably would have helped with that. I feel like congress was busy with shit that doesn’t affect anything.
I salute whoever has the challenge of explaining basic cryptography principles to Congress.
That’s why I feel like this idea is useless, even for the general population. Even with some sort of visual/audio based hashing, so that the hash is independant of minor changes like video resolution which don’t change the content, and with major video sites implementing a way for the site to verify that hash matches one from a trustworthy keyserver equivalent…
The end result for anyone not downloading the videos and verifying it themselves is the equivalent of those old ”✅ safe ecommerce site, we swear" images. Any dedicated misinformation campaign will just fake it, and that will be enough for the people who would have believed the fake to begin with.
Should probably start out with the colour mixing one. That was very helpfull for me to figure out public key cryptography. The difficulty comes in when they feel like you are treating them like toddlers so they start behaving more like toddlers. (Which they are 99% if the time)
Fucking finally. We’ve had this answer to digital fraud for ages.
Sounds like a very Biden thing (or for anyone well into their Golden Years) to say, “Use cryptography!” but it’s not without merit. How do we verify file integrity? How to we digitally sign documents?
The problem we currently have is that anything that looks real tends to be accepted as real (or authentic). We can’t rely on humans to verify authenticity of audio or video anymore. So for anything that really matters we need to digitally sign it so it can be verified by a certificate authority or hashed to verify integrity.
This doesn’t magically fix deep fakes. Not everyone will verify a video before distribution and you can’t verify a video that’s been edited for time or reformatted or broadcast on the TV. It’s a start.
We’ve had this discussion a lot in the Bitcoin space. People keep arguing it has to change so that “grandma can understand it” but I think that’s unrealistic. Every technology has some inherent complexities that cannot be removed and people have to learn if they want to use it. And people will use it if the motivation is there. Wifi has some inherent complexities people have become comfortable with. People know how to look through lists of networks, find the right one, enter the passkey or go through the sign on page. Some non-technical people know enough about how Wifi should behave to know the internet connection might be out or the route might need a reboot. None of this knowledge was commonplace 20 years ago. It is now.
The knowledge required to leverage the benefits of cryptographic signatures isn’t beyond the reach of most people. The general rules are pretty simple. The industry just has to decide to make the necessary investments to motivate people.
The number of 80 year olds that know what cryptography is AND know that it’s a proper solution here is not large. I’d expect an 80 year old to say something like “we should only look at pictures sent by certified mail” or “You cant trust film unless it’s an 8mm and the can was sealed shut!”
The President’s job isn’t really to be an expert on everything, the job is more about being able to hire people who are experts.
If this was coupled with a regulation requiring social media companies to do the verification and indicate that the content is verified then most people wouldn’t need to do the work to verify content (because we know they won’t).
It obviously wouldn’t solve every problem with deepfakes, but at least it couldn’t be content claiming to be from CNN or whoever. And yes someone editing content from trusted sources would make that content no longer trusted, but that’s actually a good thing. You can edit videos to make someone look bad, you can slow it down to make a person look drunk, etc. This kind of content should not considered trusted either.
Someone doing a reaction video going over news content or whatever could have their stuff be considered trusted, but it would be indicated as being content from the person that produced the reaction video not as content coming from the original news source. So if you see a “news” video that has it’s verified source as “xXX_FlatEarthIsReal420_69_XXx” rather than CNN, AP News, NY Times, etc, you kinda know what’s up.
