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The information era has gained a lot of traction due to the abundant digital media contents through technological broadcasting resources. Among the information providers, the social media platform has remained a popular platform for the widespread reach of digital content. Along with accessibility and reach, social media platforms are also a huge venue for spreading misinformation since the data is not curated by trusted authorities. With many malicious participants involved, artificially generated media or strategically altered content could potentially result in affecting the integrity of targeted organizations. Popular content generation tools like DeepFake have allowed perpetrators to create realistic media content by manipulating the targeted subject with a fake identity or actions. Media metadata like time and location-based information are altered to create a false perception of real events. In this work, we propose a Decentralized Electrical Network Frequency (ENF)-based Media Authentication (DEMA) system to verify the metadata information and the digital multimedia integrity. Leveraging the environmental ENF fingerprint captured by digital media recorders, altered media content is detected by exploiting the ENF consistency based on its time and location of recording along with its spatial consistency throughout the captured frames. A decentralized and hierarchical ENF map is created as a reference database for time and location verification. For digital media uploaded to a broadcasting service, the proposed DEMA system correlates the underlying ENF fingerprint with the stored ENF map to authenticate the media metadata. With the media metadata intact, the embedded ENF in the recording is compared with a reference ENF based on the time of recording, and a correlation-based metric is used to evaluate the media authenticity. In case of missing metadata, the frames are divided spatially to compare the ENF consistency throughout the recording.
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