Another Move in the Deepfake Creation/Detection Arms Race
Deepfakes are now mimicking heartbeats
In a nutshell
- Recent research reveals that high-quality deepfakes unintentionally retain the heartbeat patterns from their source videos, undermining traditional detection methods that relied on detecting subtle skin color changes linked to heartbeats.
- The assumption that deepfakes lack physiological signals, such as heart rate, is no longer valid. This challenges many existing detection tools, which may need significant redesigns to keep up with the evolving technology.
- To effectively identify high-quality deepfakes, researchers suggest shifting focus from just detecting heart rate signals to analyzing how blood flow is distributed across different facial regions, providing a more accurate detection strategy.
And the AI models will start mimicking that.
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Clive Robinson • May 5, 2025 1:23 PM
@ Bruce,
As you say,
Many years ago now I pointed out that all bio-metrics would or could be faked.
Likewise the first Woman to be Director of MI5 pointed out National ID cards would not work.
The reason is that you can not have sufficient security of the entire process.
Remember those “tamper proof” sample bottles used for athletic “drug tests” that Russia apparently had no trouble tampering with?
Well consider the CPU chip that compares the test reading with the stored reading has a limited security perimeter. Yes it can secure the “stored reading” but how far can it secure back along the test chain to the “alleged” meatbag?
The simple fact is the meatbag can not be secured even though the measuring sensor “might” be securable it leaves a gap in which,
“Angels might dance, but devils will play…”
And thus there is no security…
The UK and Australian Governments do not this widely known because of the latest idiocy of “Age Gating” for online access…
The simple facts are shocking when people find out
Most adults can not tell the sex of an unrelated child untill the child is over four years old and for some children not until they are entering puberty. It’s one of the reasons children’s clothing type and colour are significantly different as are their hair cuts.
But what about adults?
If you are of slim physique and moderate stature you are in effect how you dress and act. With a little makeup and hairstyle changing…
I’ve a friend who was when younger a top class athlete and tall in stature and had much to her annoyance been regularly mistaken for being a boy, lad, and even into adulthood as a young man…
Put people into “universal clothing” like military field dress and you have the same problem in both directions.
But it gets worse, for instance it’s a “known secret” that passports have never worked as ID documents because the error rate under testing has found to be worse than 1 in 6 either way (false pos/neg). Hence the prolific black market in stolen passports.
Similar for the bio-metric passports under ideal conditions claims of 1 in 1000 soon disappear as conditions change to normal or worse.
But the fun one, “eye witnesses” are unless they actually know the suspect fairly intimately worse than 25% at best when it comes to a line up…
It’s why the Police used to love pulling line ups because they were easy to “direct the witness” to the target of choice…
So now consider if the “test subject” wants to “pass themselves off” as another they are going to find a lot of wriggle in that gap between sensor and the meat and there is effectively nothing you can do to stop it happening.
The fact even current AI LLM & ML systems can do this is just the start… Consider the not to distant future AI with enhanced fake-it abilities.
Legislation and Law and Order will have no meaning as any “evidence” could be “reproduced”.
Oh and now the “mains hum/noise” trick is known, that won’t be reliable as a timestamp / fingerprint.