Comment by Ajedi32

20 hours ago

Who posts raw output from cameras anywhere? This doesn't seem useful outside some niche use-cases (like security camera footage). At a minimum just about every recording is going to be re-compressed for streaming.

Synthid and the like survive compression and decent quality rerecording.

  • Synthid is a watermark which indicates the video is AI-generated, not a digital signature indicating it's real. Completely different use case and threat model.

    I'm not aware of any secure digital signature schemes that don't require the thing they signed to be bit-for-bit identical to pass verification. There are perceptual hashing algorithms that could theoretically be used to build such a scheme, but such hashes are not second preimage resistant, so someone could create a modified video that still passes signature verification.

I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.

  • Perhaps that could work in certain situations, but you don't even necessarily need digital signatures for that. A link to a reputable news site claiming they've verified the footage as real would be good enough in like 95% of cases, people just don't bother to check.

    You'd also need close to 100% adoption for this to be effective, otherwise people will just assume the fakes were recorded with one of the cameras that doesn't have that feature, or that they didn't bother to upload the raw footage anywhere.

  • How on top of security do you think all the camera manufacturers are going to be? That is, how long until people can sign videos that were not, in fact, shot with their camera?

    • Proving that you were able to upload something that is not real would go viral so it's very attractive to people to share such findings, meaning it would not last long, then they fix it and that's it, specially because they can require you to upgrade your camera's firmware if you want to keep using their attestation service.

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  • Only if you're paying them

    • Attention is valuable these days, so making people go to their websites for people to check if something is real is good for them, its people they can try to sell more cameras (or phones) and all that.

  • They can attest pictures of my hairy pendulous ballsack.

    • Joking and all but sexting would benefit from this technology, if it can vouch about the time, GPS location and email address of the owner then the receiver can have some certainty about the pic (if the sender decides to share such attestation link/info, of course)

I don't think it needs do be raw output. I'm pretty sure that signatures can exist within image and sound outputs that are reproducible when changing to other formats.