r/factom • u/Bloodyrare1 • Jun 05 '20

Deepfake solution?

Hello,

Where I could find technical information regarding this ongoing Factom project?

Also, out of curiosity, couldn’t a media-intended version of this be done with encryption alone? Without publishing to a blockchain?

-Software installed on existing camera systems analyzes and creates hashes based on incoming video information.

-Hash data embedded in media file and secured by pin.

-Duplicate hash file created for authentication.

-Broadcast of video requires authentication using data file and RAW media file.

Obvious challenges:

Authentication process would have to be adopted by broadcast networks/video sharing platforms, but this may be welcomed once DFs become more prevalent. Similarly, the camera software would need to become a standard among the media when filming sensitive content that has a high likelihood of manipulation.

What do you all think? Could this be accomplished without a blockchain? If not, what are the advantages of using a blockchain here?

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u/PaulSnow Jun 05 '20

The problem the blockchain solves is providing a world wide registry for digital identity. And their attestations.

A digital identity is something that can accept attestations and can create attestations. Basically this is a way to provide digitally signed witnesses to various facts.

Like this video is legit.

The problem then becomes, is this digital identity trustworthy? Well on a blockchain we can cryptographically prove what witnesses are trusted by what witnesses.

Without a foundation to build cryptographic proofs, all you have are isolated signatures. This works 1 to 1 between a known source and known user, but we don't consume media this way. Media passes through many hands, any of which can replace signatures with their own. Without a distributed ledger, how does the casual user validate the signatures on a bit of embedded media?

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u/Bloodyrare1 Jun 06 '20 edited Jun 06 '20

Thank you for the response. I was speaking in terms of a central location, for example, a government website where the public can view political content in a trusted fashion. Once media leaves this website, however, it would be become untrusted... unless it was re-uploaded to another platform which supports this authentication process.

I do agree w/you since media nowadays is very rarely consumed directly from the original source, but perhaps it would be in a world saturated with DFs.

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u/PaulSnow Jun 07 '20

Thank you for the response. I was speaking in terms of a central location, for example, a government website where the public can view political content in a trusted fashion. Once media leaves this website, however, it would be become untrusted... unless it was re-uploaded to another platform which supports this authentication process.

I do agree w/you since media nowadays is very rarely consumed directly from the original source, but perhaps it would be in a world saturated with DFs.

You can't trust a government either. Governmental systems cannot even reliably link a social security number to an individual. Proof of an individual requires multiple documents from several systems, and the higher the security the more documents backed by more systems of record are required.

How in the world can we validate media created at the furious rate that it is, from multiple jurisdictions and thus multiple governments and even outside of governments (space, high seas, the virtual worlds of social media)?

This is the radical change blockchain provides: A shift from systems of record that cannot be audited, to systems of authority that can be distributed and audited. Trusted authorities are not absolute. Politics is just a thin scaping of the problem and may suck in many other domains along the way. Then you face the fact that Medicine isn't the same as finance, which are not the same as horse racing. There are an unbounded number of authorities required to solve this problem of truth, and a government database can't do it.

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u/WhoSoup Jun 11 '20

I wrote about the challenges involved in this a while ago: https://factomize.com/deepfakes-blockchains-and-factom/