Aletheia
Fight fake news with cryptography & human nature
The Problem
Inspiration
I should probably start with
with why I started Aletheia in the first place.
Audio
Computers can now synthesize you
saying things you never said
Video
They can also (almost) create video of you
saying and doing things you never did
This is the next generation of fake news
The Current Solution
AI to detect discrepancies
- Slow
- Expensive
- Arms Race
A Proposed Solution: Aletheia
Leverage our natural method for fake detection: reputation
We may not know if we can trust an audio clip
...but we know how much we trust
the person/company providing it.
If the BBC broadcasts a video of Theresa May threatening war with the EU, you might believe it...
...but what if it was InfoWars?
Reputation Matters
How it Works
(In two parts)
Now with diagrams!
[ Signing ]
Here's what a file typically looks like
Aletheia pulls the body of the file out and generates a signature of it with your private key
Tack the signature onto the header,
along with where to find the public key
The resulting file is a little bigger,
but now contains the origin
[ Verification ]
Extract the key URL and signature from the header
Fetch the key from that URL.
Use the key to verify the signature against the file body
A Story
Details are annoying. Let's see an example.
The Progress So Far
Proof-of-concept in Bash
(don't use that)
A working Python library
$ pip install aletheia
Currently supports six file types:
jpeg,
mp3,
mkv,
mp4,
webm,
and
html
...but it's properly extensible
class AwesomeFile(File):
SUPPORTED_TYPES = ("mime/type",)
def get_raw_data(self) -> bytes:
"""
Return the "meat" of the file (the blue part)
"""
def sign(self, private_key, public_key_url: str) -> None:
"""
Write to the header.
"""
def verify(self) -> str:
"""
Read from the header & call .verify_signature() to return
the origin domain name.
"""
A wrapper command-line utility
$ aletheia generate
$ aletheia sign /path/to/image.jpg
$ aletheia verify /path/to/image.jpg
An example site
$ curl https://danielquinn.org/aletheia.pub
Demo!
Next Steps
Extending
It should support other popular formats:
- png
- gz
- suggestions?
Porting
Not everyone uses Python
- Ruby
- Javascript
- PHP
- Java
- Rust
- Clojure
- Go
- C
- C#
Packaging for various environments
It'd be nice if people could install it as part of their OS
- Debian/Ubuntu
- Redhat/CentOS
- Arch ✅
- Gentoo
- Homebrew
- Whatever it is Windows uses
