Key Takeaways:
- In the future, reality notaries will play a crucial role in verifying the authenticity of digital content, including photos, videos, and documents.
- Cryptographic hashing and provenance checks are essential tools for ensuring the integrity of digital evidence.
- Deepfakes and AI-generated content pose significant challenges for reality notaries, requiring specialized skills and software to detect and analyze.
- The process of verifying digital content involves a combination of technical analysis, internet sleuthing, and old-fashioned detective work.
- The importance of reality notaries will continue to grow as technology advances and the risk of digital deception increases.
Introduction to Reality Notaries
Imagine a future where deepfakes and artificial-intelligence-generated content are everywhere, and the need for verification and authentication has become a vital part of our daily lives. In this scenario, a new profession has emerged: the reality notary. As a reality notary, your role is to verify the authenticity of digital content, including photos, videos, emails, contracts, and more. Your clients rely on you to protect their money, reputation, and sanity, and in some cases, their freedom. As the article notes, "You were still at university in the mid-2020s when deepfakes went from novelty to big business. Verification firms reported a 10-fold jump in deepfakes between 2022 and 2023, and face-swap attacks surged by more than 700 percent in just six months."
The Sterile Lab
When a client brings in a USB flash drive containing surveillance footage of a shooting, your first step is to connect it to an offline computer with a write blocker. This is like bringing evidence into a sterile lab, where you can analyze the file without contaminating it. You hash the file, which creates a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to verify its integrity. As the article explains, "Cryptographic hashing, an integrity check in digital forensics, has an ‘avalanche effect’ so that any tiny change—a deleted pixel or audio adjustment—results in an entirely different code." If the hash matches the one on the affidavit, you can be confident that the file has not been tampered with.
Digital Fingerprints
The next step is to run a provenance check, which involves analyzing the file’s history and tracking its movements online. This can be done using Content Credentials, which are like a passport for digital files. However, as the article notes, "most have been slow to adopt, and Content Credentials are often stripped as files circulate online." You also examine the file’s metadata, which can provide clues about its origin and authenticity. However, as the article warns, "the time stamps don’t match the time of the murder. They were reset at some point—all are now listed as midnight—and the device field is blank."
The Physics of Deception
As you analyze the video, you begin to notice inconsistencies in the physics of the scene. The shadows, lighting, and movement of the objects in the video do not quite add up. You use specialized software to detect these anomalies and to identify potential signs of manipulation. For example, you look for the "shimmer" of a screen being recorded, which can indicate that the video was created by filming a monitor. As the article explains, "The flicker is the sign of two clocks out of sync. A phone camera scans the world line by line, top to bottom, many times each second, whereas a screen refreshes in cycles—60, 90 or 120 times per second."
Artifacts of the Fake
As you dig deeper, you start to look for artifacts of the fake, such as watermarks or other signs of manipulation. You use software to detect these artifacts and to analyze the video frame by frame. You also use reverse-image searches to see if the accused son’s face appears in other contexts. As the article notes, "You break the video apart into stills. You use the InVID-WeVerify plug-in to pull clear frames and do reverse-image searches on the accused son’s face to see if it appeared in another context." By combining these different techniques, you can build a comprehensive picture of the video’s authenticity.
The Final Calculation
After conducting a thorough analysis, you are able to determine that the video is a deepfake. The shooter’s face has been cloned and superimposed onto another person’s body, and the video has been recorded from a screen to remove the watermark. You use basic trigonometry to calculate the shooter’s height, which does not match the accused son’s height. As the article concludes, "The video makes sense now—it was made by cloning the son’s face, using an AI generator to superimpose it on the shooter and recording the screen with a phone to remove the generator’s watermark." Your findings will be presented in a notarized document, which will be used to exonerate the accused son.
Conclusion
In the future, reality notaries will play a vital role in verifying the authenticity of digital content. As technology advances and the risk of digital deception increases, the importance of reality notaries will only continue to grow. By combining technical analysis, internet sleuthing, and old-fashioned detective work, reality notaries can help to ensure that people and institutions are what they appear to be. As the article notes, "In 2030 a ‘reality notary’ is no longer science fiction; it is the person whose services we use to ensure that people and institutions are what they appear to be."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-digital-forensics-could-prove-whats-real-in-the-age-of-deepfakes/