At Intersec 2025, ONVIF will showcase its surveillance solutions. Additionally, on January 15, Leo Levit, Chairman, ONVIF Steering Committee will give a presentation: Matter of Trust: Media Authenticity in Video Surveillance. Part of the Security Leaders Summit. Here, we hear all about what ONVIF has to offer.
What can visitors to your Intersec presentation expect to see?
LL: “At Intersec this year, we are speaking about the topic of video authenticity. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to ensure that surveillance video has not been altered or tampered with so it can be a trusted source of evidence in court proceedings or as part of a corporate investigation.
“New publicly available tools that use Generative AI can enable almost anyone to alter digital video, whether that is a video posted on social media or footage from a surveillance camera. This poses real challenges to surveillance users to protect the integrity of their video and the organisational trust in surveillance video.”
Can we expect any announcements from you at the show?
LL: “During our presentation, we’ll be explaining how the rise in deepfakes and the technologies to create them are sophisticated enough that it is seamless to the viewer. In surveillance video, it’s not the deepfakes that pose all the risk – simple alterations in the timestamp, the removal of critical events/ frames of video can be just as misleading as substituting faces to create false narratives. This can create doubt in the integrity of evidence in criminal investigations, court proceedings, and internal corporate investigations, where the authenticity of footage can pivotally influence outcomes.
“We will discuss how ONVIF has developed a method to add a digital key to video footage to be able to verify its authenticity based on the specific camera that recorded the video. Specifically, a signature (or unique digital fingerprint) is created for each video frame, and the frames are then packaged and “signed” using a digital certificate that is unique to that individual camera. This signature allows a video management client, video player, etc. to verify that the video data originated directly from the specific camera and has not been tampered with.”
What do you feel you are offering that sets you aside from your competitors?
LL: “ONVIF standards are created to benefit end users and systems integrators and the industry as a whole by providing standards that are publicly available for anyone to use. We have designed our video authenticity specification in the same fashion and have created a single, standardised mechanism for video management systems or external content players to verify the authenticity of the video it has received.”
What do you think will be the main drivers for business next year?
LL: “There are already existing ways of protecting video, but in the near future these traditional forensic techniques won’t be adequate to safeguard video from sophisticated gen-AI tools. This highlights the need for industry collaboration and standardisation as a way to preserve the integrity of video and the institutional trust in the footage as an accurate view of a scene. I think these protections will quickly become an important value-add in the video ecosystem.”
What will be the primary challenges, and what is your strategy to overcome potential hurdles?
LL: “Standards need to be adopted by a critical mass of users to be effective. This has been realized by most of the other standards that ONVIF has produced, but adoption is never a sure thing. To help this along, we are planning to release the implementation of video authentication as an open-source project. This will give additional transparency to the standard and enable others to take advantage of these open specifications to customise it to their particular needs if required.”
Are there any special considerations or additional support that you offer your clients across the Middle East?
LL: “We recognise that regulations are extremely important for many countries in the Middle East, setting high standards for the use of security technology by the government, local authorities and commercial enterprises. ONVIF interoperability specifications are used widely by many governments and regulators around the world, including in the Middle East. We anticipate that future standards developed by ONVIF can also prove helpful in maintaining these high standards as technology advances and the need for interoperability grows.”
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