What Is C2PA?
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is a joint effort by Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, BBC, and others to create a standard for content provenance. C2PA Content Credentials are cryptographically signed metadata embedded in or attached to digital content. They answer three questions: Who created this content? How was it created or modified? When was each change made? Think of it as a tamper-evident chain of custody for digital media.
How Content Credentials Work
A C2PA manifest contains: assertions (claims about the content — creator identity, creation tool, AI generation status, edit history), a claim (a signed collection of assertions — the overall provenance statement), a signature (cryptographic proof from a trusted certificate authority), and a manifest store (the full chain of manifests, linking back to the original creation). When content is modified, a new manifest is added to the chain. Each manifest references the previous one, creating an immutable provenance history. Verification involves checking the signature chain and ensuring no assertions have been tampered with.
What v2.2 Adds
C2PA v2.2, released in late 2025, introduces several improvements: cloud-based manifest storage (content doesn't need to carry its own provenance — manifests can be stored remotely and linked via URL), enhanced AI disclosure (explicit assertions for AI-generated and AI-modified content, including model identification), soft bindings (provenance that survives format conversion, cropping, and moderate editing), and improved privacy controls (selective disclosure of creator information). The soft bindings feature is particularly important. In v2.1, converting a JPEG to PNG could break the provenance chain. v2.2 uses perceptual hashing to maintain provenance across format changes.
DRD's C2PA Integration
DRD integrates C2PA through a custom Ed25519 C2PA signer built on jose with multi-provider key management (In-Memory, Environment, HSM/AWS KMS, Local File). When content enters the DRD pipeline: the content is fingerprinted (SHA-256 per-frame hashing for video, dHash perceptual hashing for images), a C2PA manifest is created with DRD as the claim generator, the manifest includes assertions about the content's registration, protection status, and ownership, and the signed manifest is stored both embedded in the content and in DRD's manifest store. This dual storage ensures provenance survives even if the embedded data is stripped.
Verification Flow
When someone encounters DRD-protected content, verification works like this: extract the C2PA manifest from the content (or fetch from DRD's manifest store), verify the signature chain back to DRD's certificate, check assertions against DRD's registry (is this content still registered? Is the claimed owner still the owner?), and return a provenance report with full history. DRD exposes this as a single API call: drd.content.verify(contentHash). The response includes the full provenance chain, current protection status, and any active enforcement actions.
Why Provenance Matters Now
Generative AI has made it trivially easy to create convincing fake content. Deepfakes, synthetic voices, and AI-generated images are indistinguishable from authentic media. Provenance is the answer — not detecting fakes (which is an arms race), but proving authenticity (which is cryptographically sound). C2PA doesn't try to detect fake content. It proves that authentic content is authentic. That's a much stronger guarantee.
Ready to protect your digital rights?
Get started with DRD — governance, enforcement, and trust for AI agents and digital content.
Start FreeRelated posts
Automating DMCA Takedowns at Scale
Manual DMCA takedowns don't scale. Here's how to automate the detection, filing, and tracking of copyright takedown requests across platforms.
Content ProtectionDigital Watermarking for the AI Era
A comprehensive guide to visible, invisible, and forensic watermarking — and how modern AI watermarking tools protect content without degrading quality.