Video verification to counter deep fakes

I was sitting down today and was imaging my own crime drama when I was remembering the show Numb3rs. I then thought about my days as a cashier, I would have to verify ID cards to sell tobacco and alcohol.

I put these two ideas together and thought what if we hid a pattern in videos. The specific idea I had was hiding a pattern in the luminescence values of a video. When we applied a “key” or a mathematical algorithm to the video it would highlight specific pixels that would be the same for the entire video. Since the “key” would be kept secret until needed in a court of law, any deep fake of a video would disrupt this patter and would be viable as a blank space in the patter where the changes were made.

Sadly I cant find away to have a public/private key thing available so anyone could verify, or even the web browser could do it in the background without also giving access to the pattern so people could learn the fake it.

In the end, I do think hiding patters in the original video, that can only be revealed by applying a math formula to the entire video may be the way to go. We do have checksums, such as md5 and such, but I am not sure how practical they will be to streaming video over the internet. Also, you would have to find the right md5 video on the internet, both sides would clam their md5 checksum is the true checksum, and it may be, for their version of the video. The other option is to build in a key into the recording device, or have trusted keys just like we do know, that are kept safe by a signing authority.

What do you think? How would you build “watermarks” into vidoe’s to prove their authenticity?

Any form of embedded pattern would be a way easier problem to crack than the deep fake itself.

The concept you talk about is called “Steganography”

1 Like