The problem SiPPP solves

AI is dominating the headlines, it's hard to tell if photos are real, misinformation, bullying, or just something we've never seen before, and many people develop health issues as a result. As we scroll through socials or watch the news, there's no simple way to verify photo provenance, which affects our confidence and our decision making. Impressionable minds will believe absurdity on socials and harm themselves striving to achieve a false standard; Misinformation will subtley work its way as people can't easily differentiate; Real information may be dismissed and rob someone of justice; Unrealistic beauty standards may lead to depression or worse. We need an "at a glance" solution to verify a photo hasn't been altered, to verifying photo provenance.

Challenges we ran into

SiPPP Problems

Photo Provenance

Our primary challenge was how to prove any given photo is unaltered. We considered a number of approaches, including encryption schemes, social attestations, multiple photo corroboration, etc.; For version-one (v1) we chose a multi-wallet seed-phrase attestation approach, where:

1. The binary SiPPP mobile app takes a photo and saves it with rich metadata
2. The app immediately pins the the photo to IPFS
3. The user submits the photohash and a signed photo has to the smart contract
4. The smart contract verifies the signature and registers the photo
5. Anybody can verify the photo by inspecting the transactions on chain

Securing SiPPP App Wallet Private Keys

Part of choosing our Photo Provenance solution architecture included operating our SiPPP App Wallet on users’ phones without compromising the wallet’s private keys. Our use case is any mobile photo app, so our solution needed to work within Android and iOS mobile app ecosystems. Turned out, many mobile apps utilize binary executables delivered through the Node Package Manager (npm) service; So all we need to do was compile the React Native for each operating system, and deploy to our npm, making those binaries easy to integrate for any mobile photo app.

Web2 Friendly Wallet & DID

Users might have multiple phones, multiple wallets, or may be new to web3 and need to create a wallet. In addition, our photo provenance approach is further secured when users can verify photos originated from the same user. To ensure one-user-one-account, we used Privy, which provides both wallet creation and decentralized ID solutions.