Poster: Preventing Fake News through Live Speech Signature

Malicious editing to alter audiovisual content has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, as it allows for targeted defamation, the dissemination of disinformation, and the incitement of political unrest. Public speeches and statements made by political leaders, public figures, and celebrities are particularly vulnerable to such attacks, as they have the power to sway public opinion. The widespread use of smart devices to record live speeches, combined with unrestricted content sharing and redistribution on social media platforms, makes it difficult to prevent the spread of manipulated media. Existing solutions, which rely on source control over the media, are not effective for live events. This paper presents TalkLock, a speech integrity verification system that can enable live speakers to protect their speeches from malicious alterations even when the speech is recorded by any member of the audience. The core idea is to generate meta-information from the speech signal in real-time and disseminate it through a secure QR code-based screen-camera communication. The QR code when recorded along with the speech embeds the meta-information in the content and it can be used later for independent verification in stand-alone applications or online platforms. A user study with live speech and real-world experiments with different types of voices, languages, environments, and distances show that TalkLock can verify fake content with 94.4% accuracy.