The White House wants to ‘cryptographically verify’ videos of Joe Biden so viewers don’t mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden’s AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is “in the works.”
The White House wants to ‘cryptographically verify’ videos of Joe Biden so viewers don’t mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden’s AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is “in the works.”
Depending on the implementation, there are two cryptographic functions that might be used (perhaps in conjunction):
Cryptographic hashes: An arbitrary amount of data (like a video file) is used to create a “hash”—a shorter, (effectively) unique text string. Anyone can run the file through the same function to see if it produces the same hash; if even a single bit of the file is changed, the hash will be completely different.
Public key cryptography: A pair of keys are created, one of which can only encrypt data (but can’t decrypt its own output), and the other can only decrypt data that was encrypted by the matching key. Users (like the White House) can post their public key on their website; then if a subsequent message purporting to come from that user can be decrypted using that key, it proves it came from them.
Public key cryptography would involve signatures, not encryption, here.
A note on this. There are other videos that will hash to the same value as a legitimate video. Finding one that is coherent is extraordinarily difficult. Maybe a state actor could do it?
But for practical purposes, it’ll do the job. Hell, if a doctored video with the same hash comes out, the White House could just say no, we punished this one, and that alone would be remarkable.
This concept is known as ‘collision’ in cryptography. While technically true for weaker key sizes, there are entire fields of mathematics dedicated to probably ensuring collisions are cosmically unlikely. MD5 and SHA-1 have a small enough key space for collisions to be intentionally generated in a reasonable timeframe, which is why they have been deprecated for several years.
To my knowledge, SHA-2 with sufficiently large key size (2048) is still okay within the scope of modern computing, but beyond that, you’ll want to use Dilithium or Kyber CRYSTALS for quantum resistance.
SHA family and MD5 do not have keys. SHA1 and MD5 are insecure due to structural weaknesses in the algorithm.
Also, 2048 bits apply to RSA asymmetric keypairs, but SHA1 is 160 bits with similarly sized internal state and SHA256 is as the name says 256 bits.
ECC is a public key algorithm which can have 256 bit keys.
Dilithium is indeed a post quantum digital signature algorithm, which would replace ECC and RSA. But you’d use it WITH a SHA256 hash (or SHA3).
You’d need to find one that was not just coherent, but that looked convincing and differed in a way that was useful to you—and that likely wouldn’t exist, even theoretically.
Pigeon hole principle says it does for any file substantially longer than the hash value length, but it’s going to be hard to find
Even for a 4096 bit hash (which isn’t used afaik, usually only 1024 bit is used (but this could be outdated)), you only need to change 4096 bits on average. Even for a still 1080p image, that’s 1920x1080 pixels. If you change the least significant bit of each color channel, you get 6,220,800 bits you can change within anyone noticing. That means on average there are 1,518 identical-looking variations of any image with a given 4096 bit hash, on average. This goes down a lot when you factor in compression: those least significant bits aren’t going to stay the same. But using a video brings it up by orders of magnitude: rather than one image, you can tweak colors in every frame The difficulty doesn’t come from the existence, it comes because you need to check 2⁵¹² = 10¹⁵⁴ different images to guarantee you’ll find a match. Hash functions are designed to take a while to compute, so you’d have to run a supercomputer for an extremely long time to brute force a hash collision
Most hash functions are 256 bit (they’re symmetric functions, they don’t need more in most cases).
There are arbitrary length functions (called XOF instead of hash) which built similarly (used when you need to generate longer random looking outputs).
Other than that, yeah, math shows you don’t need to change more data in the file than the length of the hash function internal state or output length (whichever is less) to create a collision. The reason they’re still secure is because it’s still extremely difficult to reverse the function or bruteforce 2^256 possible inputs.