Ars Technica@arstechnica@mastodon.social
Scientists hid secret codes in light to combat video fakes
“Video used to be treated as a source of truth, but that’s no longer an assumption we can make.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/scientists-hid-secret-codes-in-light-to-combat-video-fakes/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
Justin Derrick@JustinDerrick@mstdn.ca
@arstechnica@mastodon.social Authenticating video should be a solved problem. Use a Public Key Infrastructure to assign people certificates / keys.
When publishing a video, 'sign' it by inserting an SHA-256 hash with every keyframe (based on the content of each prior intermediate frame, and optionally the prior SHA-256 hash to make a blockchain), and then at the end insert a message containing each SHA-256 hash with it's frame number, encrypted by the private key, and include the public key and URI for where it can be verified...
The only thing that makes this different from encrypted and signed eMail is the multiple hashes/blockchain on slices of the video's data.
It may even be possible to add this to existing video containers because many allow for text streams to be embedded.