Enabling Live Video Provenance and Authenticity: A C2PA-Based System with TPM-Based Security for Livestreaming Platforms

The growing spread of misinformation in recent years has become a concern for both governments and citizens, highlighting the need to verify the origin, authenticity and history of media files. This relevant information, commonly referred to as provenance, provides media consumers with assurance that the content originates from a known and trusted source and has not been tampered with. To address the challenge of misinformation, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has standardized the certification of media authenticity and provenance. While C2PA defines embedding standards for various media, it lacks specifications for live video streaming with provenance data. To bridge this gap, we propose a live video streaming system that incorporates the C2PA manifest data. The proposed solution is based on the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol for transmitting live video content, and uses the C2PA Software Development Kit (SDK) to generate and embed metadata at the source to be verified at the client-side backend. Our solution also relies on a hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as a Secure Element (SE) to sign the manifest data. It is demonstrated that the use of a TPM ensures strong authenticity and attestation while introducing minimal delay to the video streaming pipeline. Finally, we also explore how this technology could be integrated into livestreaming services like Twitch to allow viewers to verify that the stream is trustworthy, while simultaneously providing content creators with protection against content manipulation and copyright infringement.