Integrating Content Authenticity with DASH Video Streaming

Abstract

The importance of content authenticity and provenance has significantly increased in the digital era, due to the rampant spread of misinformation, which makes it necessary to build safe and trustworthy systems. To this effect, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has emerged as a leading organization that provides content provenance (https://c2pa.org/), certifying the source and history of media content, which empowers users to assess the authenticity and trustworthiness of a piece of content. The group has created the specification and various tools for generating, attaching, and verifying C2PA manifest for different media assets such as audio, image, and video files. However, there is still a gap when it comes to video streaming, where fragmented MP4 (fMP4) files are commonly used. Although the C2PA standard has specified the manifest generation of fMP4 files, the verification and visualization of the result during consumption is left unspecified. In this paper, we introduce a client-side implementation of C2PA validation for video streaming. Our solution builds on top of DASH.js for the player engine and video.js for the player UI. As the content plays, the provenance verification result is displayed on the player UI through the timeline and an C2PA icon, reflecting whether the verification has passed for the content being viewed. Viewers can also quickly check additional information, such as the content authors and editing history, using a second-level menu by clicking the icon. Our demo showcases that our solution provides robust verification, smooth playback, and an intuitive UI for users to stream videos with content authenticity.