Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Immutable Deepfake Auditing in Digital Judiciary Systems: Hardware-Rooted Sensor Provenance, Verifiable Image Signal Pipelines, and Consortium Blockchain Evidence Custody
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The exponential advancement of generative artificial intelligence—specifically diffusion transformers, neural radiance fields (NeRFs), and autoregressive multimodal synthesis—has precipitated an existential epistemological crisis across the global judiciary. In modern criminal and civil jurisprudence, photographic, video, and acoustic evidence has historically functioned as the bedrock of factual adjudication. However, contemporary deepfake generation architectures now fabricate photorealistic video footage that evades conventional digital forensic heuristics (photo-response non-uniformity, chromatic aberration, and spectral facial blood-flow photoplethysmography). This vulnerability has catalyzed the systemic emergence of the "Liar's Dividend," wherein culpable litigants plausibly dismiss authentic, unmanipulated surveillance evidence as synthetic fabrications, introducing synthetic reasonable doubt under Federal Rules of Evidence 901 and 902. Reactive AI-based deepfake classifiers remain inherently flawed due to high false-positive rates (14.2%–26.8% under realistic video compression) and vulnerability to adversarial gradient attacks. This research monograph presents an end-to-end cryptographic architecture for deterministic, hardware-rooted evidence verification: Verifiable Digital Evidence Architecture (VDEA). VDEA unifies on-sensor physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and hardware trusted execution environments (TEEs) with zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and a permissioned judicial consortium blockchain: • 1. Hardware-Rooted Provenance: When photons strike a CMOS image sensor (CIS), raw Bayer sensor data, lens telemetry, and GNSS spacetime coordinates are cryptographically bound at the hardware layer via a 256-bit PUF-derived key.• 2. Verifiable Image Signal Processing (vISP): Arithmetized as an algebraic circuit over the BN254 elliptic curve, mathematically proving that demosaicing, white balancing, and DCT-based compression were executed strictly according to deterministic algorithms with zero pixel-level insertion or semantic alteration.• 3. Zero-Knowledge Selective Redaction: A specialized protocol enabling the privacy-preserving masking of juvenile victims or sensitive bystanders while mathematically certifying global frame authenticity.• 4. Consortium Blockchain Evidence Custody: A high-throughput, Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed ledger maintaining an immutable, tamper-evident audit trail of evidentiary custody. Micro-benchmarks executed on ARM TrustZone and RISC-V Keystone embedded hardware establish proof generation times of 1.42 seconds for 1080p keyframes and courtroom verification latencies under 4.2 milliseconds, reducing verification costs to less than USD 0.002 per evidentiary submission while establishing an unassailable mathematical standard of digital legal truth. Author: Kartik Kothalkar (कार्तिक कोथलकर)Affiliation: Independent Applied Cryptography & Verifiable Computing Researcher, Maharashtra, IndiaEmail: [email protected]
Author: Kothalkar, Kartik
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213996972