Glossary
C2PA
C2PA is a provenance standard that attaches a signed, tamper-evident manifest to a file, describing its origin and edit history.
Updated
Also written: Content Credentials, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.
The difference from every other block described here is the signature. EXIF, IPTC and XMP can be rewritten silently; a C2PA manifest is cryptographically signed, so alteration is detectable. It is designed to be tamper-evident rather than tamper-proof — the goal is that changes show, not that changes are impossible.
It is where AI generators declare themselves. Several hosted image models attach a credential identifying the output as machine-generated and naming the issuer.
Storage is per-container: an APP11 marker segment in JPEG, a dedicated chunk in PNG, an item in the ISO base media containers. None of those are places ordinary EXIF viewers look, which is why a file can report almost nothing and still be carrying a full manifest.
The full explainer covers what credentials do and do not achieve.
Related terms
- Provenance — Provenance is the record of where an image came from and what has been done to it since.
- JUMBF — JUMBF is a generic box format for embedding structured data in a file, and the wrapper every C2PA manifest is stored in.
- Digital source type — Digital source type is an IPTC metadata field that declares how an image was created, from a camera capture to fully AI-generated.