Truepic Breakthrough Charts a Path for Restoring Trust in Photos and Videos at Internet Scale

Overview

Today, Truepic Inc., the leader in provenance-based photo and video authentication, announced that it has successfully achieved the world’s first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture in a prototype mobile device, powered by the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 865 5G Mobile Platform. The device produces photos with cryptographically-sealed provenance data whose authenticity can be verified by recipients.

The announcement marks a watershed moment in society’s battle against deceptive photos and videos, be they “deepfakes” or “cheapfakes”. Deceptive visual content is an imminent danger that is eroding trust on the internet, which can impede everything from transacting online to making important personal, financial, and even political decisions.

“The world is digitizing most human interactions, a trend that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jeff McGregor, CEO of Truepic. “Simultaneously, we have seen a rapid growth in visual deception, fraud and disinformation online. These two trends cannot safely co-exist without a trust mechanism to help protect those capturing and viewing images. Today’s announcement represents the future of digital imagery on the internet—and a scalable, long-term solution to the problem of visual deception online.”

According to Infotrends, 85% of all pictures taken in 2017—estimated at over 1.2 trillion photos—were captured on smartphones. The figure underscores the critical role that smartphone photography plays in online visual communication. Securing photo capture in hardware and integrating it as a native feature of the smartphone can put the technology in everyone’s hands, while fortifying it against malicious attacks and hacking. The widespread adoption of the technology can provide a strong, secure foundation upon which to rebuild trust in visual media at the scale of the internet.

This breakthrough milestone was achieved with the new Truepic® Foresight™ system, the hardware-secured version of the patent-pending, next-generation of Truepic’s award-winning Controlled Capture technology. Truepic integrated Foresight into the Snapdragon 865 reference design, taking advantage of the underlying hardware security. The Truepic Foresight system features:

1. The Truepic Foresight trusted application firmware for the Qualcomm® Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) of Snapdragon 865
2. The Truepic Foresight middleware for the Android™ operating system
3. The Truepic Foresight Certificate Authority cloud service
4. A modified version of the device’s native camera app

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. “We are pleased that Snapdragon is providing the platform on which this crucial deepfake countermeasure is being developed.”

The Foresight capability is accessible through a new “Secure” capture mode in the device’s native camera app. Engaging this mode and pressing the capture button produces a digital photo that contains cryptographically-sealed provenance data, formatted in accordance with emerging open standards. The data allows a recipient to authenticate the pixels, date and time, geolocation, and 3D depth map that were securely-acquired and sealed into the file at the time of capture.

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.

About Truepic

Truepic develops the world’s most secure camera technology for mobile devices. We empower viewers to make better-informed decisions through high integrity photos & videos. Truepic Vision, our flagship product, enables our partners to instantly gather and view trusted visual documentation from anywhere in the world. Our team is dedicated to restoring trust in every pixel of consequence, with the goal of having a shared sense of visual reality across the internet by 2030.