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- Hi, my name is Paul England.
I'm a distinguished engineer at Microsoft
and I'm working on Project Origin.
I've been at Microsoft for over 20 years
and mostly I work on platform security technologies.
Over the last year, I've been working
with Rico Malvar and other media experts
within Microsoft and outside and outside on Project Origin.
So, Origin is a system which Microsoft
is building with partners to combat the huge problem
that society has with misinformation on the web right now.
So what we're trying to do with the Origin Project
is to sort of elevate traditional news media
so that people can see where news is coming from.
And in particular, more credence from news
that's coming from the sources that they trust.
What we observe is that fake media
is getting better and better and better,
and the ability for computers to tell
what's real and what's fake,
or users to tell what's real and what's fake,
is rapidly tending to zero.
So rather than trying to detect fake media on the internet,
what we're trying to do with Project Origin
is to try and put a provenance or authentication layer
on media on the web so that when you get a piece of media,
simplistically you can see where it came from.
We can work with any sort of media,
simple media just like a text file or a PDF document, say,
but also audio, also imagery.
But the sort of media that we've been
focusing most on in Project Origin is video.
So what do we mean by an authentication
or a provenance layer for media?
So, there are three things we're trying to do
with the Origin system.
The first is we're trying to authenticate
the source of the video.
We wanna be able to reliably authenticate it
as coming from that source.
The next thing we want to ensure
is that the video has not been modified
since it was published by the publisher.
So, we want to detect, or worry about at least,
modifications like video being clipped
to be taken out of context.
And we wanna make sure that no other
modifications have been made to the video
that kind of destroy the intent of the news organization
or publisher when they published it.
The third thing we wanna do with the Origin system
is to allow the publisher
to associate metadata with the video.
So metadata is any sort of tag
that the publisher thinks is important
to improve the context or the background of the video.
So that could be just something as simple
as the title of the video,
it could be the people that are in the video,
it could be the date, the video was recorded.
If a video is an edited copy of several things
that are assembled together, the metadata could include
the source information that video.
So how do we add this provenance layer
to video in Project Origin?
The starting point is something we call a manifest.
You can think of a manifest as a digital envelope
that contains the video or other media
and the metadata we talked about.
So the manifest is cryptographically bound
to the video that it's describing.
And the purpose of the cryptographic binding
is to make sure that any modification to the video
will break the association between the manifest
and the video that it's describing.
So this is the way we guard against
adversarial modifications of the video
which people are doing to try and mislead the viewer
that the video is something other than it says it is.
So now we have a manifest.
The manifest is bound to the video
through this cryptographic binding.
It contains the metadata, but we're still not quite there.
The final thing we need to do is to make sure
that nobody else can make a manifest for the video
that says it's something other than it is.
And the way we do this is with something
called a digital signature.
A digital signature is very much
like a handwritten signature, but sort of better.
Handwritten signatures are meant to prove
who wrote a particular document.
The digital signature does exactly the same thing,
but it's based on a cryptographic key.
And as long as the publisher keeps
that cryptographic key secret so no one else can get at it,
then we know no way that somebody else
could forge a digital signature for a manifest.
So, the manifest bound to the media
and now signed using a digital signature
is our main building block for building trust
in media with Project Origin.
However, we go beyond that simple system
in a variety of ways.
The first thing is we add an extra layer of security
beyond the digital signature by allowing the manifests,
essentially these videos,
to be placed on a public ledger or blockchain.
Many of you have probably heard about blockchains.
It's the same technology that underlies
modern electronic currencies like Bitcoin.
But blockchains and public ledgers
are actually very interesting security technologies
that have a wide range of uses.
And the way we're using them in Project Origin
is to allow people to place their videos
and their manifests on these blockchains.
And so everybody, in a very public way,
can see what was published, when it was published,
the order that things were published.
In Project Origin, we've been experimenting
with a Microsoft blockchain technology called CCF,
for a Confidential Computing Framework.
We believe that because there are many
different blockchain technologies
with different security characteristics,
that eventually we will be able to support
multiple blockchain so that any particular
use case or scenario can pick the blockchain technology
that's most appropriate for the security guarantee
that you're trying to give.
So the second trick we're adding with Project Origin
is something we call a manifest database.
So ideally when you watch a video on the web,
the manifest for that video will be there.
So the app you're using to watch the video,
or the website you're using to watch the video,
or the browser can consume that manifest
and display that information to the user.
However, because video delivery is extremely complicated
with video taking many different paths to users
through different content distribution networks,
through different social media platforms,
we think that it's likely that early on,
manifests are sort of gonna get lost
from the point of publication to the point they're consumed.
So our manifest database allows you as a consumer of a video
or tools on your machine and your app,
say, that's playing the video,
to query our database and see whether there's a manifest
for the video that you're watching.
The challenge is that in order to check a digital signature,
you normally have to download the whole document
to check the note that is being modified
from what's specified in the manifest
and what you're playing.
But the way modern video distribution works
is it's progressively transmitted.
You don't need to wait
for two gigabytes of video to download.
You just have to download a couple of seconds of video
and then your player starts playing it.
And so we need our authentication system
to work in the same way.
Rather than authenticating the whole video,
we have to be able to authenticate a few seconds at a time.
So we need to make sure that our provenance
and authentication system
works with modern video delivery today.
The final thing we have to deal with with Project Origin
is video delivery is very, very complicated.
You might think that as a publisher,
you put a video up on the website
and then everybody watches that video,
but that's not the way it works any longer.
If you put a video on a website, typically what will happen
is the website, or the content distribution network,
or the social media platform,
or even a company like Netflix,
they take that video and they re-encode the video
into many different formats
that are optimized for different purposes.
We need to build a manifest that can describe
dozens or even hundreds of videos
for these different representations
that are used to provide this adaptive
bit rate transmission we see for videos today.
So how do we do this?
We built something which we call a Transformation Manifest,
and what a Transformation Manifest is,
it allows a publisher or a social media platform
to say this video that you're watching now
is a faithful reproduction of some other source video.
And these Transformation Manifests
can be built for the dozens or hundreds
of copies of a video that are needed
to support this adopted bit rate transmission.
And as far as the user's concerned,
they just think that they're seeing a video
from the news source that they expected.
We think that social media platforms
that will adopt this technology,
and will be building this Transformation Manifest
to make sure that the information
that the publisher put into the video
is properly conveyed to users.
However, we still think that in the next few years,
as we build this ecosystem, videos are gonna be seen
that have not gone through
this sort of care during transmission,
and essentially they're gonna lose their manifests
and lose their bindings.
So we're also researching a set of technologies
that we call Fingerprinting Technologies,
which allow tools to establish that one video
is a faithful reproduction of another video.
For more technical information about Project Origin,
please follow these links.
The Exploring Project Origin site
contains a deep dive on many of the issues we've discussed,
and the Archive Paper contains even more information.
The GitHub link contains information about CCF,
and the Project Origin blog
will be updated with our latest news.
So, Microsoft is working with our partners
to bring together a set of technology and news
and other companies to work together
on building this providence layer in Project Origin.
So the standards organization that Microsoft
is putting together with its partners to address the problem
of providence in media is called CCPA,
or the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.
And I encourage you to find out more about this organization
and maybe even participate in our work.
Thank you.
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