The fight against AI content manipulation has gained a powerful new alliance. ONVIF is excited to announce our strategic collaboration with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), marking a significant step forward in preserving digital video integrity across video surveillance and other industries.
The C2PA is an organization backed by major media, publishing, social media and digital asset companies, such as Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Meta, BBC, Truepic and many more. Its core objective is to certify the source and history (or provenance) of media content through the development of technical standards. The offerings of both the C2PA and ONVIF are well aligned in this fight against content manipulation by offering proactive frameworks to ensure video integrity at creation vs traditional detection-only methods.
This partnership comes at a critical time in the digital world. As synthetic media, deepfakes, and AI-generated video content become increasingly sophisticated and indistinguishable from authentic footage, the risks to public trust in video evidence continue to escalate. Whether it’s surveillance footage used in criminal investigations, corporate security incidents, or legal proceedings, any doubt about video authenticity can undermine outcomes and erode institutional confidence.
As a global standards organization with nearly 34,000 profile conformant products, ONVIF understands the critical importance of securing video at its earliest point—when the camera sensor captures the footage. By standardizing video authentication at the source, we eliminate the need to prove the chain of custody because authenticity can be verified at every step.
Our media signing specification ensures that video footage is cryptographically signed at the point of capture with a digital key specific to each individual surveillance camera. These signatures are embedded directly in the video, enabling authentication tools to verify whether video frames have been modified or manipulated throughout the entire chain of custody. This is complementary to the C2PA’s Content Credentials standard, which acts like a digital “nutrition label” for media content, offering users transparency into a video’s origin, history, and any modifications.
Together with the C2PA, we’ll be promoting these methods of video authenticity to accelerate the shift toward trusted video evidence across all sectors that depend on authentic visual content. This alignment creates a comprehensive approach to video integrity that spans from security cameras to broader digital media platforms when maintaining public trust in digital media has never been more important.
