ABOUT THE LAB
The Starling Lab for Data Integrity was co-founded by the Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering and USC Shoah Foundation to explore the future of trust in digital records. Our academic research includes many practical questions faced by journalists.
How can you know a photo is real?
How do you prevent a social media post from disappearing?
Starling often finds answers using applied cryptography and decentralized systems, which can reveal tampering and protect content from destruction. By establishing the authenticity of your work using a cryptographic root of trust, we empower journalists to prove critical information about each digital asset: Who? What? When? Where?
But … why now? As artificial intelligence is poised to produce infinite synthetic content, there’s a scarcity of authenticated content. Deployed in real-world investigations, our technologies can help you build trust with audiences and fight misinformation. For example, we can create an “authenticity certificate” for your photos, including verifiable metadata. Or we can preserve authenticated copies of web pages vulnerable to deletion and linkrot.
In 2023, Starling’s projects have won or been a finalist for awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (News Emmys), National Press Club, National Press Photographers Association, American Society of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club of America, Scripps Howard, Deadline Club, Society of Publication Designers, News Leaders Association, National Headliner Awards, Clarion Awards and more.
TECHNOLOGIES SUCCESSFULLY DEPLOYED
Authenticated Web Recording: As part of investigations with Rolling Stone and the Associated Press, Starling preserved and authenticated social media posts that were at risk of deletion after stories went live. We’ve also done this at scale, capturing over 10,000 individual web pages of suspected Russian misinformation for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Authenticated In-Person Media Capture: Starling has implemented a variety of ways to capture photo, video, and audio with cryptographic roots of trust. These include mobile apps and professional cameras. Projects have involved Reuters, South China Morning Post, Inside Climate News and Bay City News. Separately, our legal accountability work in Ukraine was covered by CNN and cited in a UN Human Rights Council report as an emerging good practice.
User Verification Of Authenticated Assets: Starling ensures that audiences can explore authenticity metadata, whether using open-source WordPress plugins or custom-built microsites. Readers can even inspect photos (including source and modifications), comparing versions to confirm that only permissible edits like crops and color correction have been made. We leverage Adobe Photoshop’s content credentials, third-party inspection tools from the Content Authenticity Initiative, and standards from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).
Modification Tracking Using Commercial Digital Asset Managers: To integrate with professional newsroom workflows, Starling collaborated with Reuters and Canon to implement end-to-end authenticity tracking through FotoWare’s digital asset manager.
Cryptographically Verified Redactions: Journalists sometimes redact documents to protect sources or people not subject to an investigation. Audiences might question if other changes were made. Under the guidance of a Stanford cryptography professor, Starling deployed “zero knowledge proofs” on sensitive payroll documents to cover personally identifying information. ZK proofs allow experts to verify the integrity of underlying documents and establish that the only alterations were the redactions.
Decentralized Content Storage: Starling uses decentralized clouds to redundantly preserve archives, including appropriate methods for sensitive data that require encrypted storage and controlled access. We’ve used distributed systems like IPFS, Filecoin and Storj in journalism projects. For USC Shoah Foundation, we preserved 56,000 audio-video testimonies from genocide survivors (a collection of four petabytes, which is four million gigabytes) in a system intended to last for generations.
Immutable Records: Across these projects, Starling pioneered methods to register investigative records using certificate signing and a variety of different blockchains. We use hashes, which are like a unique fingerprint for data (including whole files). This means that if someone later receives copies of records from an unknown source, they can verify the “fingerprint” of the newly received documents against the original “fingerprint” – confirming whether or not there was any tampering.
TECHNOLOGIES IN DEVELOPMENT
Authenticated 3D/VR/Metaverse Experiences: Good for documenting scenes or objects in the real world which are likely to change or be destroyed. Starling has completed successful tests in Ukraine using both photogrammetry and neural radiance fields (NeRFs), and we are developing extended reality (AR & VR) interfaces for user verification.
Encrypted SD Cards: Journalists have been asking manufacturers for encrypted cameras for almost a decade. As an alternative, Starling is testing encrypted SD cards, including ones with session-based passwords that could protect a journalist’s work product when crossing borders or in other sensitive situations.
Authenticated Web Whistleblowing: Infiltrating an extremist group’s online forums can require cooperation from a person already inside – and that person’s affiliations may raise questions of trust. Containerized web recording can allow informants to leak information without compromising passwords or personal information.
Authenticated Asynchronous Interview Recording: The rapid adoption of teleconferencing tools for interviews has created an opportunity for impersonators. But the use of asynchronous recording services (ex: Riverside, OpenReel) also presents us with opportunities to establish a cryptographic root of trust in authenticated interviews.
Cell Tower Data Attestation: The rise of 5G networks has enabled a new field of edge computing that allows us to authenticate information from personal devices – and potentially professional cellular bonding services used by broadcasters.
Witness Servers: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine taught the world how web pages change over time. But pages also vary based on IP address, cookies, and more. Each load is a unique performance, creating opportunities for misinformation, censorship and denialism. We can counter these threats with witness servers, offering independent version attestations. This can allow trusted institutions to provide corroboration and observations of a journalist’s work.
User Verification Of Video Edits: Similar to what Starling has done with photo version histories, we’re looking to implement similar transparency in video projects.
Collaborative Investigative Tools: Starling is combining authenticated attributes with existing open-source tools, ideal for OSINT (open source intelligence) investigations as well as preservation and sharing of public records.
Fact Checking Attestations And Identity Management: Starling is exploring the use of decentralized social graphs and single-signer ledgers to facilitate authentication and discovery of fact checks, and to help identify newsrooms making attestations.
WANT TO TEAM UP ON A PROJECT?
Starling is interested in tackling problems with trust and authentication being faced by newsrooms. We do academic research with a focus on open-source implementation, so our goal is to produce case studies. We do not develop or sell products. Instead, we can provide engineering support throughout a single investigation. Each collaboration is unique. Often, we award a journalism fellowship (which can include a stipend) to an experienced professional working under the editorial direction of their regular newsroom.
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