This new technology may restore trust in photos and videos against the rise of deepfakes - Android Police

A company called Truepic is working on a overly-witty-named feature called "Foresight" that promises to bring hardware-backed security to photos and videos.

You can just as easily call it "hardware-secured photo capture," and it's really pretty simple.

Truepic, the aptly-named company behind the technology, has been working with Qualcomm to bring it to your next phone.

The company gave us a demo of its technology on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 reference device last week, and it's pretty snazzy, claiming to offer end-to-end security for the capture process, courtesy of Qualcomm/ARM's standardized TrustZone platform.

In the call I watched, we actually had to switch from a screenshare of the phone to a camera just to see the process work because even the camera's preview couldn't be recorded externally — it's all super secure, end-to-end.

Photos and videos taken this way are also loaded metadata for irrefutable provenance: Things like location, time, a 3D depth map, and image previews can all be included and cryptographically signed in a way that can't be changed.

It's just one of those things that can't really work until everyone is on board with it.

Right now, it's just a proof of concept.

Furthermore, though we saw a demonstration of the process for photos, it isn't working for videos just yet.

First Native Integration of Hardware-Secured Photo Capture in a Mobile Device Paves the  Way for Enabling Authenticity for the Trillion-Plus Photos Taken on Smartphones Annually;  Allows Dissemination of Authentic Content as a Viable, Scalable Countermeasure to  Visual Disinformation, Image Fraud, and Deepfakes .

Foresight leverages the cutting-edge hardware security features of Snapdragon 865,  including the secure hardware pipeline of the Qualcomm Spectra™ camera 480  Image Signal Processor (ISP), which is resistant to image data and operational control  tampering.  .

“This development paves the way for visual content consumers to determine the  trustworthiness of photos and accurately discern authentic versus forged content,”  said Manvinder Singh, Vice President, Product Management, Qualcomm  Technologies, Inc?

With the power and breadth of the Snapdragon ecosystem, Truepic Foresight  achieves unprecedented levels of hardware-based security and resilience for media  capture, scalability to hundreds of millions of devices across price tiers, deep integration as a native feature of the smartphone without requiring the installation of  a 3rd party camera app, and a privacy-first architecture that forgoes the need to  uniquely identify the user or the device.  

Qualcomm, Snapdragon, and Qualcomm Spectra are trademarks or registered trademarks of Qualcomm  Incorporated. 

Qualcomm Snapdragon, Qualcomm Trusted Execution Environment, and Qualcomm Spectra are products of  Qualcomm Technologies, Inc