NSA, FBI, and CISA Release Cybersecurity Information Sheet on Deepfake Threats

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2023/09/12/nsa-fbi-and-cisa-release-cybersecurity-information-sheet-deepfake-threats

by snagg • 3 years ago

167 170 3 years ago

cisa.gov

upofadown• 3 years ago

Entities like CFOs and political leaders will have to start cryptographically signing their statements. There is no practical way to detect fakes after the fact.

baq• 3 years ago

A great not-quite-unexpected renaissance of PGP...?

rightbyte2• 3 years ago

Really? How about not using unofficial channels for statements?

I mean, what is new to this problem. Other than it is somewhat cheaper to pair the fake statement with the person responsible reading it out laud.

Department press release -> Reuters -> News paper -> reader

No signing required. The reader can verify the press release of he wants to.

Voultapher• 3 years ago

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/2650/

aqme283• 3 years ago

You rarely need a perfect fake because you rarely need to convince everyone, you can often achieve the same goal by just convincing a large group of people.

Also, official channels get hacked too.

carstenhag2• 3 years ago

It is different in my opinion.

* Text: You have little (definitive) clue who wrote what. You essentially have to ask the (apparent) writer.

* Photo: You used to have high confidence that a picture shows who appears to be shown. Not 100%, sure, but it's high.

* Video & Audio: You used to have very high confidence that the video including its audio are genuine. It was very difficult to replace video and/or audio.

Nowadays, none is trustworthy by default anymore. You can say: Well, just trust the company or Reuters. Sure, but I don't think anyone cares about this case. It's not controversial. But how will they be able to verify controversial sources?

If they get sent a video claiming to be about Ukrainins killing civilians, and outfits & speech matching that, how can Reuters be sure about anything now? Trust can't be given to the source, nor to the video, nor to the audio, nor to the metadata.

jasonjayr• 3 years ago

Whistleblowers also can't use official channels.

dangerface• 3 years ago

What happens when the news paper just makes stuff up because they need a more click baity article? People click links on emails without verifying the sender what makes you think readers will track back through the chain you describe to verify anything?

Don't roll your own authentication.

remus• 3 years ago

This assumes people are consuming news through official channels which I don't think is true in a lot of cases. For many people, news is whatever pops up in their facebook/instagram/twitter feed, and it's relatively easy to slip fake content in there.

lazide2• 3 years ago

It’s trying to solve the social issue of ‘omg react!’ videos and random reshare clips through technical means (proving the clip isn’t original).

Which it won’t. Eventually might be relevant when in a context where someone actually stops and spends time looking at evidence (civil and criminal court cases perhaps?) but those already use chain of custody for evidence because evidence has already been easy to fake for… well forever.

Still should be done IMO though, as it’s cheap and easy and will hopefully make it a little harder (or easier to detect) to do mass faking in the ‘middle’ - like fake IDs for online services, fake blackmail photos, etc.

cwillu• 3 years ago

https

wojciechpolak• 3 years ago

All official materials should primarily be posted on the original authors' websites and signed using asymmetric cryptography. Furthermore, new open standards should be established to enable the presentation of such signatures/verification on well-known platforms like YouTube, FB, etc. These platforms should always provide a clear reference to the original material along with its digital signature.

For example, when watching a video on YouTube containing a speech by the president (provided on an official channel like the White House's), there should be a clear indication that the video has a digital signature and the option to verify it on an independent government website.

nicce3• 3 years ago

There are already coming cameras which sign the data on the fly with help of hardware security modules. Only that can be truly verifiable.

Adding signature after recording works to certain degree, but it still does not guarantee that the content is what the camera saw.

mc32• 3 years ago

Isn’t this a problem? Someone can take an actual clip of a speech but because it’s not signed by the speaker no matter how bad the speech, it could be declared inauthentic or deepfake because it has no signature?

For example the whitehouse is known to revise the text of the president’s speeches when he says the wrong thing. If we only have officially released videos where the gaffes and fables are left out, how is anyone to know what he actually said?

helsinkiandrew2• 3 years ago

The vast majority of uses for deep fakes is not for content that would appear on an official site: surreptitious videos of CEO/Politician doing illegal or embarrassing behaviour, racist tweets and emails from when they were college students etc.

insanitybit2• 3 years ago

At the same time, now when a sex tape comes out for someone they can claim it's a deepfake.

pokstad4• 3 years ago

… or do everything in person. You know, like before computers existed.

anononaut• 3 years ago

That just delegates trust to media channels, which are equally as untrustworthy.

briffle• 3 years ago

I honestly find it suprising that photo's and video's taken with a smart phone are not signed in some way to ensure they are not modified.. Would love to see it become more mainstream, since editing is so easy.

shrubble• 3 years ago

Images and video that goes against the approved government and/or media narratives == 'deepfake' .

matheusmoreira• 3 years ago

No idea why you're being downvoted. Governments the world over propagate disinformation every single day with absolute impunity.

Yesterday I was reading this article about the day the USA almost accidentally nuked itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

The Pentagon claimed at the time that there was no chance of an explosion and that two arming mechanisms had not activated.
A United States Department of Defense spokesperson stated that the bomb was unarmed and could not explode.
In 2013, information released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that a single switch out of four (not six) prevented detonation.

Nobody should ever trust a single thing these people say.

artursapek2• 3 years ago

Hacker News downvotes anything that makes them feel unsafe

2devnull3• 3 years ago

Yes, the featured article makes that clear the tools are not the threat, the “democratization of” the tools is the specific threat they are alerting people to. Hollywood and big brother have been doing propaganda and fake photos since forever, that’s not the problem CISA is reporting.

whatamidoingyo• 3 years ago

I worry about this. It's already quite difficult getting to the truth of something - every political party essentially flinging shit at each other with accusations of lies.

At this point, giving up entirely on any form of media seems appealing.

tomohawk• 3 years ago

These are some of the very same government entities that were caught working with their surrogates at social media companies to censor speech that they declared misinformation. In their vernacular, misinformation may be 100% true information that goes against the narrative that they want to promote.

rtkwe9• 3 years ago

This again? They pointed out posts they believed violated places like Twitter's TOS and in the case of Twitter most of the time Twitter left them up and took no action against the material. A pretty shoddy censorship campaign in my opinion, it was blown up by Elon and the partisan actors he released the data to to support a political point they've been griping about for ages.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

This again?

You're talking about something that has been ruled by two courts as a massive first amendment violation, and is heading to the Supreme Court (if they even want it), as if it were a conspiracy theory.

And what political point are you even talking about, where do you learn to use this tone about serious issues, and why the fixation on celebrities like Musk?

vorpalhex2• 3 years ago

The legal issue is that they used the authority of the Whitehouse to do a "comply or there will be consequences".

We've all sat through various crappy powerpoints on ethics. That is plain and simple coercion. That's a first amendment issue and prohibited.

gadders2• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

DrThunder5• 3 years ago

The government even ASKING about accounts and when they're going to be removed or censored is a clear violation of the 1st amendment. Whether it was done every single time they asked is irrelevant. One time is more than enough. Nothing is getting blow up, you just don't like the information you're getting because it goes against the team you're rooting for.

I don't want a government or DOJ in place that allows me to have my 1st amendment rights "most of the time" except the times they don't like me having it. Are you serious with this comment?

throwoutway2• 3 years ago

President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship.
These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands.

From a nonpartisan org: https://nclalegal.org/2023/01/the-white-house-covid-censorsh...

That Biden set up a "Disinformation Governance Board" is wild. 10 years ago I would have laughed and called it Orwellian, and then it happened

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

this story writes itself like a children's book

"beware of false information" said the people who keep the biggest secrets

Ialdaboth• 3 years ago

By the way, notice how they pivoted from "false information" to "misinformation" years ago. It's transparently hilarious.

ejb9993• 3 years ago

Not just 'working with' - demanding what speech should be taken down, AND paying them to do it.

1MachineElf• 3 years ago

A recently announced breach at Retool[0] involved the use of a deepfake version of an IT employee's voice for social engineering.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37500895

andrewinardeer• 3 years ago

"My voice is my password"

e40• 3 years ago

Looking at you Schwab.

snoman• 3 years ago

Is that a reference to the game Uplink?

DharmaPolice2• 3 years ago

I must admit I found that element of the story...surprising. Has realtime faking gotten that good yet? Presumably there was back and forth in this call so this person was either disguising their voice or typing responses to be generated on the fly.

I know all this can be done, I'm just surprised it's reached the maturity where an attacker would choose to impersonate someone the call recipient presumably knew vs just being a vague "Bob from IT".

Although to be fair the article does say the employee was suspicious so maybe there was a delay which (if you were looking for it) you would spot.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

I can't remember which election it was, but the 3D animated character was pushing the limits of real-time rendering for its day when he appeared on a morning talk show and answered questions live. So the live thing has been around for quite some time. The deep fake just allows for the models to look believable. Once you have a model, you can make it do anything.

squeaky-clean2• 3 years ago

You could probably reduce the "delay" by using a soundboard of pre-generated filler material and playing that while you type the real response. "Let me find that bookmark", "So the thing about that is...", "ummm yeah. so...", "hmmm no not really"

You can also use text macros to type the response faster. Here they were trying to get MFA access, so you could map longer phrases that will come up often like "Okta multi factor authentication" to numpad 1. Company name to numpad 2. IT supervisor name to numpad 3.

If you know the target of the conversation you can tailor what you pre generate. I like to mess with scam callers when I get one, and I've noticed some are using some kind of soundboard with a woman's voice (I'm pretty positive it is real and not AI) and they have a planned flow / script. If you try to deviate from the script they have some options to bring you back into it. If you ask them to repeat something you can notice it's the exact same audio snippet as before. If you accuse them of being a bot they have a few samples of the woman being shocked and mildly embarrassed. "Oh my goodness, do I really sound like a bot? No it's just been a long work day for me. I'm sorry about that."

patwolf• 3 years ago

I'm old enough to remember back in 2005 when terrorist in Iraq claimed to be holding a US soldier hostage, and it turned out the whole thing was staged using photos of a doll:

Original story: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/world/africa/rebels-say-t... Confirmation of hoax: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6894934

It's pretty easy to see that the photo is a hoax, but many news outlets didn't notice and ran the story anyway.

I have little faith in our ability to detect deepfakes using these recommendations. It seems we'll have to assume something is fake unless we have a way to cryptographically verify its provenience.

ejb9993• 3 years ago

>It's pretty easy to see that the photo is a hoax, but many news outlets didn't notice and ran the story anyway.

More likely: many news outlets didn't CARE and ran the story anyway.

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

This is the problem with for-profit news outlets, they can't afford not to run the story that others are. State-run news outlets is also not good.

EGG_CREAM• 3 years ago

That is not really more likely. Most news outlets don't actually want to have a horrible reputation.

dudefeliciano3• 3 years ago

I always have to think of the Wu Ming Foundation/former Luther Blisset collective and their fake news/LARPing missions[1] that showed how easy it was to fool major news outlets back in the 90s. Too bad that now those same techniques have been weaponized with great success.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(pseudonym)#Li...

gadders2• 3 years ago

See also the Daily Mirror and Piers Morgan: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/15/mirror.politic...

agf• 3 years ago

Loved "Altai" and "Q", the historical fiction they produced (under that pseudonym and "Wu Ming")!

mdrzn• 3 years ago

Wow, this originated in Bologna and I've never heard of it? Very cool, thanks for sharing.

nwoli• 3 years ago

If I take a photo with a cryptographically signed camera of a polaroid containing an image that i deep faked, how does that ensure the image can be trusted?

moomoo3000• 3 years ago

Depth channel?

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

I trust that you took an unaltered picture of a Polaroid.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

I'm old enough to remember back in 2005

How to make someone feel old. All the way back to 2005, eh?

I_am_uncreative2• 3 years ago

Someone born in 2005 is a freshman in college now.

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

They ran the story as a claim that a US soldier was taken hostage, not as a fact that a US soldier was taken hostage. From the NYT article:

"The authenticity of the militants' claim Tuesday could not be immediately verified. Defense officials at the Pentagon in Washington said that the U.S. military was investigating the incident but that had no indication any of its soldiers were missing in Iraq."

superkuh4• 3 years ago

There are no deepfake threats. Deepfakes is just the hype word for digitally altering photos/videos. In the past doing this well was restricted to governments, large corporations, large institutions. And they did it regularly. Now individual human people can do it themselves. That's good. That's not bad in any form or manner.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2• 3 years ago

The difference is that rather than altered, they’re generated. It’s a new seeming-photograph that can’t be discovered as an alteration by checking against other photos to play “spot the difference”. Nobody really had this capability before.

jdjdjdjdjduuuu• 3 years ago

Before what

superkuh4• 3 years ago

Nobody really had this capability before.

I find your distinction between altering and creating to be ... a sidetrack. But okay, let's pretend I said "Deepfakes is just the hype word for digitally altering or creating photos/videos".

Large institutions/etc have definitely been able to create novel "photos" from scratch for a long time now. It was just a lot of work, which is why it was restricted to large groups of people with lots of capital. Now even individuals can do it. And that's good. The idea that prior to deepfakes that photos could not be created is not supported by my lived experience since the 1980s. Just look at any hollywood movie.

ziddoap• 3 years ago

That's not bad in any form or manner.

I can think of several ways that these types of technologies being easily accessible to anyone who wants it directly leads to bad things.

There's good things, too. But come on... Not bad in any form or manner?

cthalupa2• 3 years ago

That's not bad in any form or manner.

I really enjoy generative AI and think that we're better off with it being in the open than controlled by specific corporations.

I also think this is an absurd comment. People are already making deepfakes of classmates, coworkers, etc. and sharing them around. I'll ignore the ethics of generating them for your own personal entertainment, but I can't think of any argument that you could make that when they start getting shared that this isn't "bad in any manner" - obviously this can cause emotional distress and damage to someone.

pokstad4• 3 years ago

We got lazy with the internet age. We’re going to have to go back to basic principles again. That means if you didn’t see it with your own eyes, it’s not real. If someone didn’t tell you in person, then they didn’t tell you. Maybe this won’t be a bad thing after all.

MadSudaca3• 3 years ago

It might bring down all the bridges the internet helped build. Also, it will make the world more centralized, having to trust more on big names and institutions. As a libertarian, this is the opposite direction I’d like the world to go in.

pokstad4• 3 years ago

We need to start trusting people we know again. Not institutions or celebrities on pedestals. We need to trust our family and friends and community again.

fasterik2• 3 years ago

This is bad epistemology. I can't possibly verify all of the facts of physics, chemistry, biology, history, economics, medicine, law, politics, etc. through my own senses and through people that I know personally. It would be impossible to have any knowledge of the world that way.

The real solution is to carefully select a variety of experts who you trust as sources of information, and rely on the consensus of those experts to determine what is true, while maintaining a healthy level of skepticism.

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

I think the idea is what you say, and what the parent said.

Before internet and telephone, we still took things on faith from people we met, be it travellers or politicians or newspapers. But newspapers and politicians were more local, and didn't buy into whatever they read like scripture the way many seem to do these days.

pokstad4• 3 years ago

This is how the world worked before the internet. Your high school science teacher would directly teach you things they also learned in a lab in college.

_trampeltier• 3 years ago

I couldn't find the comment again, but as somebody else said here on HN a while ago. The comment was like ..

We live in special times. Until 100 years ago we had just news from other people, mouth to mouth. So we had to decide what is wright and what just BS. Last 100 years we had newspapers, radio and TV. News was mostly true, we could trust what we saw on pictures, on screen. But now again .. pictures can so easy be just fake. So we have to decide again, what is true and what BS:

TaylorAlexander• 3 years ago

News was mostly true

100 years ago was the time of yellow journalism, where lies were commonplace.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

mistrial93• 3 years ago

this timeline is way off .. intellectuals of the mid-1600 in certain places got news from all over the world. There were contests between language groups in all the major sciences and engineering. The printing press was beginning mass produced content.. that was all a solid 500+ years ago

efitz2• 3 years ago

Courts already have processes in place to challenge evidence; I’m not worried about them.

The problem with deepfakes is the instant amplification they’ll get from media and well-intentioned responses from people of good faith.

So there will be the deepfake of (insert your favorite politician) saying something unsavory and it’ll be taken at face value and a bunch of people will cancel their social media and bank accounts and protest in front of their houses etc etc.

The solution is super simple but unpalatable in today’s culture - waiting periods.

What if corporations were required by law to wait 30 days after a public spectacle before taking action? This would provide time for the victim to defend themselves and the truth to come out.

Similarly I have always thought that passing laws in the heat of the moment results in people’s rights being tramples. What if legislators were required to wait one year before passing laws in response to a public event of some sort? This would give time for passions to cool and alternatives to be considered and impacts to be weighed.

But this is all a pipe dream, let’s just cancel them immediately like we do now.

cthalupa2• 3 years ago

What if legislators were required to wait one year before passing laws in response to a public event of some sort?

Someone discovers a way to bypass regulations and legislature and easily acquire the material needed to create a dirty bomb and sets one off. Now we wait 365 days to fix the loophole.

Pretty obviously an absurd extremity for that example, but I sure as shit don't want there to be that level of lag time on important things like that, and I imagine most people would also want to be able to move faster in situations where it is dangerous not to. How do we determine where that line is, what the exceptions are, etc.? What happens when we need an exception and didn't realize it?

efitz2• 3 years ago

The situation you describe is really contrived.

What happens in real life is that in emergencies, the legislature passes some “sentencing enhancement” that adds on a decade or three of prison time in the circumstance. Or they create a new bureaucracy that in the end just makes life worse for everyone, like the DHS and all the airport suckage that happened after 9/11 - if you’re too young to remember, flying on airplanes did not always suck.

noonething• 3 years ago

Someones gonna use advanced airplane technology to take over the world and blame it on aliens.

NSA, FBI, and CISA Release Cybersecurity Information Sheet on Deepfake Threats

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