C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity)
Definition
An open technical standard that embeds cryptographically signed provenance assertions into media files at the point of capture or editing. A C2PA manifest, when intact and verified, provides chain-of-custody evidence about a file's creation history. A missing or broken manifest is consistent with tampering but is not proof of it.
Related terms
- Adversarial Attack
- In AI detection contexts, a forgery specifically constructed to defeat a trained detector by incorporating small perturbations that cause the detector's classifier...
- Automatic Signature Verification (ASV)
- Algorithmic systems that compare a questioned signature against a reference set using extracted biometric features (stroke curvature, velocity profile, pressure distribution). Designed...
- Container Atom / Box
- The structural metadata units inside video container formats (MP4, MOV, MKV). Atoms such as mvhd (movie header) carry creation and modification timestamps;...
- Content-Aware Fill
- An image editing feature (Photoshop from CS5; AI-driven from version 22.0) that replaces a masked region with synthesised pixel content matching the...
- Cryptographic Hash
- A fixed-length digest produced from a file's bytes by an algorithm such as MD5 (128-bit), SHA-1 (160-bit), or SHA-256 (256-bit). Identical files...
- Deepfake
- Synthetic or AI-manipulated media in which a person's likeness, voice, or both are generated or substituted using machine learning methods. Detection relies...
- Deepfake Detector
- A machine-learning classifier trained to distinguish authentic recordings from AI-synthesised or face-swapped media. Outputs a probability score rather than a binary verdict....
- Diffusion Model
- A generative neural network architecture (Ho et al., 2020; Stable Diffusion, Rombach et al., 2022) that learns to reverse a noise-addition process...
- Error Level Analysis (ELA)
- A technique that re-compresses a JPEG at a controlled quality setting and maps the pixel-level difference between the re-compressed and original images....
- ESDA (Electrostatic Detection Apparatus)
- A non-destructive technique for detecting indented impressions on paper caused by writing pressure. A physical ink signature on paper produces detectable ESDA...
- EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format)
- A metadata standard embedded in JPEG and TIFF files by capture devices. EXIF fields record camera make and model, lens data, exposure...
- False-Positive Rate
- The proportion of authentic media files that a detection tool incorrectly classifies as manipulated or synthetic. Deepfake detectors and ELA tools both...
Explained in these topics
- AI-Generated Documents, Deepfake Signatures and Image ManipulationA technical standards body (co-founded by Adobe, Microsoft, BBC, Intel) that specifies a cryptographically signed provenance manifest for media files, recordin...
- Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Approaches to Media ProvenanceAn open technical standard co-developed by Adobe, Microsoft, the BBC, and others that embeds cryptographically signed provenance manifests directly inside medi...
- EXIF and Container Metadata ForensicsAn open technical standard that attaches cryptographically signed provenance manifests to media files. Each manifest records the device, software, timestamp, a...
- Media Authentication FundamentalsAn open technical standard that embeds cryptographically signed provenance manifests into media files at the point of capture or editing. The manifest records...
- Provenance Watermarking and Invisible Signing of Synthetic MediaAn industry standards body whose technical specification defines a signed manifest format for attaching verifiable provenance metadata to media files. The mani...
- Writing a Media Authenticity Examination ReportAn open technical standard that embeds cryptographically signed provenance assertions into media files at the point of capture or editing. A C2PA manifest, whe...