Glossary
Provenance
Provenance is the record of where an image came from and what has been done to it since.
Updated
Ordinary metadata cannot establish provenance, because it is unsigned. Any field can be rewritten, so EXIF records a claim by whatever software last wrote the file rather than a verifiable history.
Provenance schemes address this with cryptography. C2PA content credentials attach a signed manifest describing origin and subsequent edits, so tampering is detectable — tamper-evident rather than tamper-proof.
Because a signed manifest can still be stripped, durable provenance pairs it with invisible watermarks in the pixels and with fingerprinting, neither of which is metadata and neither of which is affected by removing any.
Related terms
- C2PA — C2PA is a provenance standard that attaches a signed, tamper-evident manifest to a file, describing its origin and edit history.
- Invisible watermark — An invisible watermark is information encoded into the pixels of an image rather than into its metadata.
- Lossless — Lossless means the image data comes out bit-for-bit identical to what went in.