The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes

AA5B , 3 months ago

So should Taylor Swift

dejected_warp_core , 3 months ago

Wait. Did the White House just discover a legitimate use-case for NFTs?

realharo , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

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?

dejected_warp_core , 3 months ago

I was being glib, but as NFTs are (typically) images signed by a blockchain, it meets the criteria of "cryptographically signed image" in a way.

In reality, you are correct.

SpezBroughtMeHere , 3 months ago

Tinfoil hat time. It's probably because they need to start creating AI videos to show he's 'competent and coherent' and they'll say their 'tests proves that it's a real video not a fake. And since the government said it's true, morons will believe it.

hayes_ , 3 months ago

I don’t have nearly enough tinfoil for this

skulblaka , 3 months ago

If Trump is any indication, no politician will ever need to be 'competent and coherent' ever again, constituents would vote in a literal corpse if it had a sign propped on it saying "gays bad"

SpezBroughtMeHere , 3 months ago

There is that. It's kind of like the people that are proud to vote for Biden again too. The whole thing is a fucking joke.

nutsack , 3 months ago

the technology to do this has existed for decades and it's crazy to me that people aren't doing it all the time yet

Darkassassin07 , 3 months ago

I'm more interested in how exactly you'd implement something like this.

It's not like videos viewed on tiktok display a hash for the file you're viewing; and users wouldn't look at that data anyway, especially those that would be swayed by a deep fake...

aodhsishaj , 3 months ago

Likely it would be a service provided by the Whitehouse press corps and media outlets then could rehost the videos with the whitehouse watermark

AA5B , 3 months ago

Digital signature. A watermark may be useful so that an unauthorized user can’t easily hide their source without noticeably defacing the photo, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from modifying it

A digital signature is a somewhat similar idea except that signature verification fails if there are any changes. This is tough to do with a photograph, where some applications may be blindly re-encoding or modifying the resolution so those may need to be fixed.

You could argue this is a good use case for blockchain, certainly much better than those stupid monkey images. When John Stewart parodies a politician, there should be a verifiable chain of evidence from the White House release to the news bureau to his studio, before they alter the lighting to highlight orange skin tone for yucks.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In , 3 months ago

The question is how does the USER verify the authenticity. They just see a video, not a signature.

AA5B , 3 months ago

They shouldn’t have to actively verify that, but yeah, I don’t know if there is a relevant file format though

I once worked with signed xml, where the signature field is really no different than any other field, but with binary data. That data used a private key to sign a checksum if the file. For tools that understand the format, you just verify the trust chain against cert authority public keys using your local keystore. It just worked, with no action required of the user and no internet required

• if you edit the signature, the trust chain will fail validation
• if you edit other data, the signed checksum would not match and validation would fail
• if you edit the checksum, the key would no longer match and validation would fail

It’s actually been a lot of years, so I hope I’m remembering it accurately

cley_faye , 3 months ago

Like you said, the issue is in verification by the end-user. It is trivial to provide a digitally signed (and timestamped) file. It is also trivial to provide trusted tools to verify these files. It is immensely difficult to provide a solution user will care about; which is why more often than not the most people asks companies in the data authenticity business is "can we show a green check on screen? That would be perfect!".

And we end up with something that nobody checks beyond the "it's probably ok" phase. If the goal is to teach the masses about trusting their source, either they have a miracle solution, or it just won't work.
(and all that is assuming people actually care about checking the authenticity of the stuff they see, which is not a norm as it is…)

recapitated , 3 months ago

I've always thought that bank statements should require cryptographic signatures for ledger balances. Same with individual financial transactions, especially customer payments.

Without this we're pretty much at the mercy of trust with banks and payment card providers.

I imagine there's a lot of integrity requirements for financial transactions on the back end, but the consumer has no positive proof except easily forged statements.

phoenixz , 3 months ago

Yeah but that would require banks to actually invest money to improve customer trust... Not something banks are very interested in, really. It's easier and cheaper to just have the marketing department come up with some nonsense claim and advertise that instead.

FlyingSquid , 4 months ago

I don't blame them for wanting to, but this won't work. Anyone who would be swayed by such a deepfake won't believe the verification if it is offered.

tacosplease , 4 months ago

Agreed and I still think there is value in doing it.

FlyingSquid , 4 months ago

I honestly do not see the value here. Barring maybe a small minority, anyone who would believe a deepfake about Biden would probably also not believe the verification and anyone who wouldn't would probably believe the administration when they said it was fake.

The value of the technology in general? Sure. I can see it having practical applications. Just not in this case.

Natanael , 3 months ago

It helps journalists, etc, when files have digital signatures verifying who is attesting to it. If the WH has their own published public key for signing published media and more then it's easy to verify if you have originals or not.

FlyingSquid , 3 months ago

I don't even think that matters when Trump's people are watching media that won't verify it anyway.

EatATaco , 3 months ago

The world is not black and white. There are not just trump supporters and Biden supporters. I know it's hard to grasp but there are tons of people in the the toss up category.

You're right that this probably won't penetrate the deeply perverted world of trump cultists, but the wh doesn't expect to win the brainwashed over. They are going for those people who could go one way or another.

FlyingSquid , 3 months ago

I find it hard to believe that there are too many people who truly can't decide between Trump and Biden at this point. The media really wants a horse race here, but if your mind isn't made up by this point, I think you're unlikely to vote in the first place.

I'll be happy to be proven wrong and have this sway people who might vote for Trump to vote for Biden though.

EatATaco , 3 months ago

So, the race is basically already decided but there is a conspiracy among the media and polling companies to make it look like the race is actually close and that there are undecides. Of course, the only way to prove this wrong would be with polls, but we've conveniently already just rejected that evidence. Very convenient.

FlyingSquid , 3 months ago

Ah yes, our oh-so-accurate polls.

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2021/07/19/pre-election-polls-in-2020-had-the-largest-errors-in-40-years/

EatATaco , 3 months ago

A couple of things.

First, your link is outdated: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-election-polling-accuracy/

Yes, 2020 was a bad year, but last year was actually a very good year. Basically what you are saying is that "4 years ago polls were bad, so that allows me to just believe whatever I want."

Second, if you believe you have no metric by which to measure something, the correct thought is "I'm not sure what the answer is" not "what I think is true must be true."

Plus, don't believe it was missed that you just outright ignored the whole part of your post that this is some conspiracy, of course thrown out there with zero evidence.

FlyingSquid , 3 months ago

Basically what you are saying is that “4 years ago polls were bad, so that allows me to just believe whatever I want.”

How on Earth am I saying that?

Second, if you believe you have no metric by which to measure something, the correct thought is “I’m not sure what the answer is” not “what I think is true must be true.”

Have you met the average Fox viewer?

Plus, don’t believe it was missed that you just outright ignored the whole part of your post that this is some conspiracy, of course thrown out there with zero evidence.

Conservative media not giving a shit about the truth isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a fact. Hence Fox having to pay a billion dollars to Dominion.

EatATaco , 3 months ago

How on Earth am I saying that?

Sorry I got it wrong. What exactly are you saying with that point?

Have you met the average Fox viewer?

What does the average Fox viewer have to do with you and your point?

Conservative media not giving a shit about the truth isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a fact. Hence Fox having to pay a billion dollars to Dominion.

Wait, now we are just talking about conservative media? I thought we were talking about the media wanting you to think there was actually a race?

FlyingSquid , 3 months ago

Yes, I was just talking about conservative media. The media as a whole loves a horse race, but they aren't generally willing to lie to get it.

That said, polls right now are all over the place, which does put the media in general in a good place because a contentious election means more viewers.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/

But that's not a conspiracy, that's just capitalism- an exciting election equals more news viewers equals higher advertising rates. Would, say, CBS news lie about the polls to achieve that? I doubt it. Would Fox? Absolutely.

EatATaco , 3 months ago

So how does this tie into your original point that it's hard for you to believe that anyone isn't decided? The whole point of bringing up polls in general was to show that this shouldn't be hard to believe at all. The claim that you were always just talking about the conservative media seems like a massive non-sequitur.

FlyingSquid , 3 months ago

Yes, when polls are all over the place, it's hard to believe them. I gave you the link to see for yourself.

skulblaka , 3 months ago

It is impossible to escape political propaganda in modern America. It's on your internet, it's on your radio, it's on your cable TV, it's on your streaming TV, it's on your super bowl ads, it's on your gas station pumps, it's on your news sources, it's on your social media. "Oh I don't pay attention to politics" is no longer a reasonable excuse because that is impossible, it's shoved down the throat of every citizen nonstop from every angle. The two candidates, in this case Trump and Biden, are such polar opposites of each other in every single possible regard that the only way someone can be undecided between the two is if their multiple personalities are arguing over it.

EatATaco , 3 months ago

So what are you saying, exactly? That the polls are made up and there is some conspiracy to mislead? What you are saying sounds potentially reasonable, but at the same time the numbers don't support it.

skulblaka , 3 months ago

Personally, I've never been polled. Not once. And neither has anyone else I've ever met in my life. I'm not saying they're made up wholesale, because frankly, I have no idea. But I am saying that, at the very least, they're not likely to be an accurate representation of the American citizenry as a whole. If nothing else, the percentage of "undecided" voters raises some eyebrows for me for the reasons I just stated. If you've lived in America the last 8-16 years and are somehow still a fence sitter, you've managed to ignore a veritable deluge of information being sprayed directly into your eyeballs with all the delicacy and care of a fire hose.

I understand the average person is probably pretty dumb, but I have faith in humanity that a significant percentage of us aren't that dumb. Being on the bell curve means you're plenty intelligent enough to understand whether you want to vote for red or for blue and for what reasons. I refuse to believe that there are people in America legitimately weighing if they would rather vote for protected freedoms for American citizens or vote for banning books that speak about protected freedoms for American citizens. The two choices are so wildly opposed to each other in structure and in intent that there isn't a choice to be made, all people will land on one side or the other of this argument and there is no center ground to waffle around.

Twenty years ago, I understood undecided voters, because there still remained some small amount of nuance in the way American politics were carried out. We have now lost that. Our political landscape is now Blue Team vs Anti-Blue Team and the fence that the undecided voters were previously sitting on is now uninhabitable rubble, because there is now no component of our government that can come to a sensible cross-aisle decision. The independent, moderate voter is now a relic of the past in our supercharged, hyper-partisan pre-civil-war violence mockery of a civilized government.

EatATaco , 3 months ago

I feel like this was a whole lot of words to dodge the actual question. I get that you don't believe that people can be still undecided, and I full understand the sentiment (although, I also recognize that I am a lot more in tune with politics than other people, this isn't calling them stupid, but simply focused on other things).

But the numbers tell a different story. So what are you saying about those numbers? That they're faked?

jj4211 , 3 months ago

Problem is that broadly speaking, you would only sign the stuff you want to sign.

Imagine you had a president that slapped a toddler, and there was a phone video of it from the parents. The white house isn't about to sign that video, because why would they want to? Should the journalists discard it because it doesn't carry the official White House blessing?

It would limit the ability for someone to deep fake an official edit of a press briefing, but again, what if he says something damning, and the 'official' footage edits it out, would the press discard their own recordings because they can't get it signed, and therefore not credible?

That's the fundamental challenge in this sort of proposal, it only allows people to endorse what they would have wanted to endorse in the first place, and offers no mechanism to prove/disprove third party sources that are the only ones likely to carry negative impressions.

Natanael , 3 months ago

But then the journalists have to check if the source is trustworthy, as usual. Then they can add their own signature to help other papers check it

jj4211 , 3 months ago

To that extent, we already have that.

I go to 'https://cnn.com', I have cryptographic verification that cnn attests to the videos served there. I go to youtube, and I have assurances that the uploader is authenticated as the name I see in the description.

If I see a repost of material claimed to be from a reliable source, I can go chase that down if I care (and I often do).

AA5B , 3 months ago

It’s not a challenge, because this is only valid for photos and videos distributed by the White House, which they already wouldn’t do.

The challenge is that it would have to leave out all the photos and videos taken by journalists and spectators. That’s where the possible baby slapping would come out, and we would still have no idea whether to trust it

throw4w4y5 , 3 months ago

If a cryptographic claim/validation is provided then anyone refuting the claims can be seen to be a bad faith actor. Voters are one dimension of that problem but mainstream media being able to validate election videos is super important both domestically, but also internationally as the global community needs to see efforts being undertaken to preserve free and fair elections. This is especially true given the consequences if america’s enemies are seen to have been able to steer the election.

Zink , 3 months ago

Sure, the grandparents that get all their news via Facebook might see a fake Biden video and eat it up like all the other hearsay they internalize.

But, if they’re like my parents and have the local network news on half the damn time, at least the typical mainstream network news won’t be showing the forged videos. Maybe they’ll even report a fact check on it?!?

And yeah, many of them will just take it as evidence that the mainstream media is part of the conspiracy. That’s a given.

OsrsNeedsF2P , 3 months ago

Deepfakes could get better. And if they do, a lot more people will start to get fooled

ilinamorato , 3 months ago

I don't think that's what this is for. I think this is for reasonable people, as well as for other governments.

Besides, passwords can be phished or socially engineered, and some people use "abc123." Does that mean we should get rid of password auth?

Thirdborne , 4 months ago

When it comes to misinformation I always remember when I was a kid I'm the early 90s, another kid told me confidently that the USSR had landed on Mars, gathered rocks, filmed it and returned to earth(it now occurs to me that this homeschooled kid was confusing the real moon landing.) I remember knowing it was bullshit but not having a way to check the facts. The Internet solved that problem. Now, by God , the Internet has recreated the same problem.

cooopsspace , 4 months ago

You mean to tell me that cryptography isn't the enemy and that instead of fighting it in the name of "terrorism and child protection" that we should be protecting children by having strong encryption instead??

Snapz , 4 months ago

We need something akin to the simplicity and ubiquity of Google that does this, government funded and with transparent oversight. We're past the point of your aunt needing a way to quickly check if something is obvious bullshit.

Call it something like Exx-Ray, the two Xs mean double check - "That sounds very unlikely that they said that Aunt Pat... You need to Exx-Ray shit like that before you talk about it at Thanksgiving"

Or same thing, but with the word Check, CHEXX - "No that sounds like bullshit, I'm gonna CHEXX it... Yup that's bullshit, Randy."

csm10495 , 4 months ago

Man some Chex mix sounds good right now. They have this one that has chocolate pieces now.

recapitated , 4 months ago

It's a good idea. And I hope to see more of this in other types of communications.

Eezyville , 4 months ago

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.

hyperhopper , 4 months ago

1. Anybody can also verify it if they just host the hash on their own website, or host the video itself.
2. Getting the general populace to understand block chain implementations or how to interface with it is an unrealistic task
3. 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.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

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.

hyperhopper , 4 months ago

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.

Natanael , 3 months ago

Trusted timestamping protocols and transparency logs exists and does that more efficiently

M500 , 4 months ago

Wouldn't this be defeated by people re-uploading the video? I think all these sites will re-encode the videos uploaded so the hash will not match, then people will use that as proof that the video is not real.

recapitated , 4 months ago

There are many unnecessary steps in that.

recapitated , 3 months ago

Guys, it doesn't need to be on a block chain. Asymmetric key cryptography is enought to verify authenticity.

dgmib , 4 months ago

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.

Natanael , 3 months ago

Transparency logs like that are helpful to show when media was first seen / published

HawlSera , 4 months ago

This is sadly necessary

VampyreOfNazareth , 4 months ago

Government also puts backdoor in said math, gets hacked, official fakes released

Squizzy , 4 months ago

Or more likely they will only discredit fake news and not verify actual footage that is a poor reflection. Like a hot mic calling someone a jackass, white House says no comment.

FrostKing , 4 months ago

Can someone try to explain, relatively simply, what cryptographic verification actually entails? I've never really looked into it.

0xD , 4 months ago

I'll be talking about digital signatures which is the basis for such things. I assume basic understanding of asymmetric cryptography and hashing.

Basically, you hash the content you want to verify with a secure hashing function and encrypt the value with your private key. You can now append this encrypted value to the content or just release it alongside it.

To now verify this content they can use your public key to decrypt your signature and get the original hash value, and compare it to their own. To get that, they just need to hash the content themselves with the same function.

So by signing their videos with the white house private key and publishing their public key somewhere, you can verify the video's authenticity like that.

For a proper understanding check out DSA :)

Natanael , 3 months ago

Only RSA uses a function equivalent to encryption when producing signatures, and only when used in one specific scheme. Every other algorithm has a unique signing function.

abhibeckert , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Click the padlock in your browser, and you'll be able to see that this webpage (if you're using lemmy.world) was encrypted by a server that has been verified by Google Trust Services to be a server which is controlled by lemmy.world. In addition, your browser will remember that... and if you get a page from the same server that has been verified by another cloud provider, the browser (should) flag that and warn you it might be

The idea is you'll be able to view metadata on an image and see that it comes from a source that has been verified by a third party such as Google Trust Services.

How it works, mathematically... well, look up "asymmetric cryptography and hashing". It gets pretty complicated and there are a few different mathematical approaches. Basically though, the white house will have a key, that they will not share with anyone, and only that key can be used to authorise the metadata. Even Google Trust Services (or whatever cloud provider you use) does not have the key.

There's been a lot of effort to detect fake images, but that's really never going to work reliably. Proving an image is valid, however... that can be done with pretty good reliability. An attack would be at home on Mission Impossible. Maybe you'd break into a Whitehouse photographer's home at night, put their finger on the fingerprint scanner of their laptop without waking them, then use their laptop to create the fake photo... delete all traces of evidence and GTFO. Oh and everyone would know which photographer supposedly took the photo, ask them how they took that photo of Biden acting out of character, and the real photographer will immediately say they didn't take the photo.

FrostKing , 4 months ago

Thanks a lot, that helped me understand. Seems like a good idea