An International Standard for Assessing Trustworthiness in Media

Abstract

The proliferation of synthetic media generation technologies, such as generative AI, has led to a surge of media content generation and consumption. While this progress opens new opportunities, especially in creative industries, it also causes challenges, including piracy, fake media distribution, and concerns about trust and privacy. In the creative sector, media modifications are often part of the production pipelines and in many application domains, creators need or want to declare the type of modifications that were performed on the media asset. The cryptographically signed association of provenance information with the media asset itself provides a trust link between the owner or editor of a media asset and its consumers. The absence of such assertions may reveal the lack of trustworthiness in media assets or worse, the intention to hide the existence of manipulations. This paper describes the JPEG Trust framework (ISO/IEC 21617) that aims to establish trust in digital media creation, modification, annotation, distribution and consumption. The framework provides standardized protocols to extract indicators to assess trustworthiness, means to annotate media provenance, and securely link the assets and associated annotations together.