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I recently chatted about the potential use of DeepFake in future propaganda with other HN readers, and apparently it's going to be here soon. You may want to fo

I recently chatted about the potential use of DeepFake in future propaganda with other HN readers, and apparently it's going to be here soon. You may want to follow this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269150 But in short, Several observations... * A major threat is end-to-end VoIP/telephony encryption. Currently, the most common way to verify one's public key and ensure that no MITM wiretapping is going on, is reading a hash (encoded to words) aloud in a phone conversation. It's used to many protocols, such as Signal, or ZRTP by Phil Zimmermann et al. There is no real security, but it's considered a shortcut with reasonable security for most people, the assumption is that voice synthesis cannot be done in real-time yet. But with DeepFake it's disastrous for cryptography. Now, this shortcut is going to be blocked soon. Full verification, like signing your VoIP key with your long-term public key, or asking security questions (e.g. OTR's SMP algorithm) is needed (perhaps not to everyone, but it's now required for a lot of people to a greater extent). * KirinDave suggested that, in additional to signing, timestamping will also be important. If automatic synthesis of video and audio becomes widespread, one way to prove the authenticity of the material is to timestamp it as soon as it's recorded, or even timestamping it in real-time if real-time forgery is a serious threat (I hope not). This is one of few use cases that a blockchain actually makes sense if you want minimum trust over 3rd-parties. The final thought is that it's time to rewatch Ghost in The Shell (the TV animation series, not the movie). Released in 2000s, it portrayed and predicted our world remarkably well, and it'll give you a lot of inspirations of what would the future society look like. In one episode, the protagonists realized a government conspiracy aimed to intensify a military conflict that involves nuclear weapon, and they had the following dialogue. > "How do we stop it? Can we post the video footage online?" > "No. Video footage is seen as completely untrustworthy today."

filoeleven 7y ago
Your second observation regarding time stamps is something I’m really interested in. The broader topic is provenance: the ability to say “this AV stream came from this device at this time.” I just wrote a post echoing KirinDave’s idea but perhaps expanding the scope in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526278 The more verifiable pieces of data that you can associate with a recording, the more you can trust that it came from when/who it claims to. If I send a recording that can be tied to: - a timestamp service with my request for one stored in a blockchain, - a tamper-evident device that signs the data with its own private key, - my own private key then you can have a high degree of certainty that I am the one who recorded and sent the content and that it has not been altered. I could still be tied to a chair while a voice actor impersonates me and forces me to send it. This is after all basically the modern equivalent of a proof-of-life photo with the kidnapped victim holding today’s newspaper. But it’s a lot more effort for someone to go through compared to having none of those other guarantees. It’s a fascinating topic that will only become more relevant as deepfaking gets easier. Whoever makes the first device/system to do this, if it’s not a flawed premise, will make a pretty penny.

filoeleven 7y ago

Your second observation regarding time stamps is something I’m really interested in. The broader topic is provenance: the ability to say “this AV stream came from this device at this time.” I just wrote a post echoing KirinDave’s idea but perhaps expanding the scope in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526278 The more verifiable pieces of data that you can associate with a recording, the more you can trust that it came from when/who it claims to. If I send a recording that can be tied to: - a timestamp service with my request for one stored in a blockchain, - a tamper-evident device that signs the data with its own private key, - my own private key then you can have a high degree of certainty that I am the one who recorded and sent the content and that it has not been altered. I could still be tied to a chair while a voice actor impersonates me and forces me to send it. This is after all basically the modern equivalent of a proof-of-life photo with the kidnapped victim holding today’s newspaper. But it’s a lot more effort for someone to go through compared to having none of those other guarantees. It’s a fascinating topic that will only become more relevant as deepfaking gets easier. Whoever makes the first device/system to do this, if it’s not a flawed premise, will make a pretty penny.