True, an image, audio clip, or video is not enough evidence to establish truth.
We still need a way to establish truth. It's important for security cameras, for politics, and for public figures. Here are some things we could start looking into.
* Cameras that sign their output. Yes, this camera caught this video, and it hasn't been modified. This is a must for recordings being used in court evidence IMO. Otherwise framing a crime is as easy as a few deep fakes and planting some DNA or fingerprints at the scene of the crime.
* People digitally signing pictures/audio/videos of them. Even if they digitally modified the data it shows that they consent to having their image associated with that message. It reduces the strength of the attack vector of deep fake videos for reputation sabotage.
* Malicious content source detection and flagging. Think email spam filter type tagging of fake content. Community notes on X would be another good example.
* Digital manipulation detection. I'm less than hopeful this will be the way in the long term, but could be used to disprove some fraud.
Blockchains can be used for cryptography time-stamping.
I’ve always had a suspicion that governments and large companies would prefer a world without hard cryptographic proofs. After wikileaks they noticed DKIM can cause them major blowback. Somehow general public isn’t aware all the emails were proven authentic with DKIM signatures and even in fairly educated circles people believe the “emails were fake” but it’s not actually possible.
Quite the opposite, governments and large companies even explicitly run services for digital timestamping of documents - if I wanted to potentially assert some facts in court, I'd definitely prefer having that e-document with a timestamp notarized from my local government service instead of Bitcoin, because while the cryptography is the same, it would be much simpler from the practical legal perspective, requiring less time and effort and cost to get the court to accept that.
We still need a way to establish truth. It's important for security cameras, for politics, and for public figures. Here are some things we could start looking into.
* Cameras that sign their output. Yes, this camera caught this video, and it hasn't been modified. This is a must for recordings being used in court evidence IMO. Otherwise framing a crime is as easy as a few deep fakes and planting some DNA or fingerprints at the scene of the crime.
* People digitally signing pictures/audio/videos of them. Even if they digitally modified the data it shows that they consent to having their image associated with that message. It reduces the strength of the attack vector of deep fake videos for reputation sabotage.
* Malicious content source detection and flagging. Think email spam filter type tagging of fake content. Community notes on X would be another good example.
* Digital manipulation detection. I'm less than hopeful this will be the way in the long term, but could be used to disprove some fraud.