"From your office, clients ask you to verify the authenticity of photos, videos, e-mails, contracts, screenshots, audio recordings, text message threads, social media posts and biometric records. People arrive desperate to protect their money, reputation and sanityand also their freedom. All four are at stake on a rainy Monday when an elderly woman tells you her son has been accused of murder. She carries the evidence against him: a USB flash drive containing surveillance footage of the shooting."
"Instead you connect the drive to an offline computer with a write blocker, a hardware device that prevents any data from being written back to the drive. This is like bringing evidence into a sterile lab. The computer is where you hash the file. Cryptographic hashing, an integrity check in digital forensics, has an avalanche effect so that any tiny changea deleted pixel or audio adjustmentresults in an entirely different code."
By 2030 deepfakes and AI-generated content permeate media, creating demand for professional reality notaries to verify authenticity of photos, videos, e-mails, contracts, messages, audio, social posts and biometric records. A client presents a sealed USB drive containing surveillance footage and an affidavit bearing a cryptographic hash. Forensic protocol requires using an offline computer with a write blocker to prevent any changes to the drive and preserve original metadata. The file is hashed on the isolated machine; cryptographic hashing produces an avalanche effect so tiny changes yield completely different hashes. Matching hashes confirm that the sampled file is identical to the originally recorded evidence.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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