Integrating Content Authentication Support in Media Services

WITNESS, 2019

Lead author: Gabi Ivens An increasing number of verified-at- capture tools and other tools for tracing authenticity provenance and edits/manipulations over time are being developed to counter misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes, shallowfakes and other 'fake news' and toprovide content validation in a time where challenges to trust are increasing. However, if these solutions are to be widely implemented, in the operating systems and hardware of devices, in social media platforms and within news organizations, then they have the potential to change the fabric of how people communicate, inform what media is trusted, and name who gets to decide. This report looks at the challenges, consequences, and dilemmas that might arise if these technologies were to become a norm. What seems to be a quick, technical fix to a complex problem could inadvertently increase digital divides, and create a host of other difficult, complex problems. Within the community of companies developing verified-at-capture tools and technologies, there is a new and growing commitment to the development of shared technical standards. As the concept of more thoroughly tracking provenance gains momentum, it is critical to understand what happens when providing clear provenance becomes an obligation, not a choice; when it becomes more than a signal of potential trust, and confirms actual trust in an information ecosystem. Any discussion of standards - technical or otherwise - must factor in consideration of these technical and socio-political contexts. This report was written by interviewing many of the key companies working in this space, along with media forensic experts, lawyers, human rights practitioners and information scholars. After providing a brief explanation of how the technology works, this report focuses on 14 dilemmas that touch upon individual, technical and societal concerns. around assessing and tracking the authenticity of multimedia. It focuses on the impact, opportunities, and challenges this technology holds for activists, human rights defenders and journalists, as well as the implications for society-at-large if content authenticity technology was to be introduced at a larger scale.

completely equipped to assimilate the detailed and complicated technical aspects of video forensics. Keywords Video forgery detection · Video tamper detection · Passive-blind video forensics · Video anti-forensics · Video content authentication · Video phylogeny detection · Video recapture detection · Video up-conversion detection

2023

Advances in media content manipulation and artificially generated content pose new challenges to the assessment of media authenticity. While automated detection methods can provide meaningful insights and decision support in some scenarios, they cannot provide trustworthy and comprehensive information about the origin and provenance of media assets. Therefore, a longer-term approach should rather focus on secure and interoperable annotations related to the creation and provenance of media. In October 2020, the JPEG Committee initiated a standardization exploration named "JPEG Fake Media" to address these needs. Subsequently, since many of the requirements, for example related to secure annotation and identification of media assets, are also relevant to achieve interoperability in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) an additional exploration was initiated, specifically focused on standardization needs for NFTs. In April 2022 a first Call for Proposals on JPEG Fake Media was issued. Based on the responses to the call, a new standardization project named JPEG Trust was initiated to specify an interoperable framework for establishing trust in media production, distribution, and consumption. This paper presents the journey of JPEG to leverage formal methods of standardization in this context, starting from the initial JPEG Fake Media exploration, followed by the subsequent consideration of NFT use cases and requirements, through to the commencement of the new JPEG Trust international standard.

Heliyon

Photos have been used as evident material in news reporting almost since the beginning of Journalism. In this context, manipulated or tampered pictures are very common as part of informing articles, in today's misinformation crisis. The current paper investigates the ability of people to distinguish real from fake images. The presented data derive from two studies. Firstly, an online cross-sectional survey (N ¼ 120) was conducted to analyze ordinary human skills in recognizing forgery attacks. The target was to evaluate individuals' perception in identifying manipulated visual content, therefore, to investigate the feasibility of "crowdsourced validation". This last term refers to the process of gathering fact-checking feedback from multiple users, thus collaborating towards assembling pieces of evidence on an event. Secondly, given that contemporary veracity solutions are coupled with both journalistic principles and technology developments, an experiment in two phases was employed: a) A repeated measures experiment was conducted to quantify the associated abilities of Media and Image Experts (N ¼ 5 þ 5) in detecting tampering artifacts. In this latter case, image verification algorithms were put into the core of the analysis procedure to examine their impact on the authenticity assessment task. b) Apart from conducting interview sessions with the selected experts and their proper guidance in using the tools, a second experiment was also deployed on a larger scale through an online survey (N ¼ 301), aiming at validating some of the initial findings. The primary intent of the deployed analysis and their combined interpretation was to evaluate image forensic services, offered as real-world tools, regarding their comprehension and utilization by ordinary people, involved in the everyday battle against misinformation. The outcomes confirmed the suspicion that only a few subjects had prior knowledge of the implicated algorithmic solutions. Although these assistive tools often lead to controversial or even contradictory conclusions, their experimental treatment with the systematic training in their proper use boosted the participants' performance. Overall, the research findings indicate that the scores of successful detections, relying exclusively on human observations, cannot be disregarded. Hence, the ultimate challenge for the "verification industry" should be to balance between forensic automations and the human experience, aiming at defending the audience from inaccurate information propagation.

Applied Computing and Informatics, 2017

Due to their massive popularity, image files, especially JPEG, offer high potential as carriers of other information. Much of the work to date on this has focused on stenographic ways of hiding information using least significant bit techniques but we believe that the findings in this project have exposed other ways of doing this. We demonstrate that a digital certificate relating to an image file can be inserted inside that image file along with accompanying metadata containing references to the issuing company. Notwithstanding variations between devices and across operating systems and applications, a JPEG file holds its structure very well. Where changes do take place, this is generally in the metadata area and does not affect the encoded image data which is the heart of the file and the part that needs to be verifiable. References to the issuing company can be inserted into the metadata for the file. There is an advantage of having the digital certificate as an integral part of the file to which it applies and consequently travelling with the file. We ultimately prove that the metadata within a file offers the potential to include data that can be used to prove integrity, authenticity and provenance of the digital content within the file.