Content Provenance and Watermarking

Content provenance answers the question “where did this image or clip come from, and what happened to it?” Two different mechanisms address it. A signed provenance record is metadata that states the origin and edit history of a file and is protected by a cryptographic signature. A watermark is a signal hidden in the content itself that a detector with the right key can find later. They fail in opposite ways, which is why they are used together, and neither one proves that a piece of content is real or fake.