Lights, camera, AI! Real-time deepfakes coming to DEF CON
At this year’s DEF CON hacker conference, visitors to the AI Village will have the chance to star in their own deepfake video by standing in front of Brandon Kovacs’ camera. The goal is to create a digital likeness of another attendee.
Kovacs, a senior red teamer at Bishop Fox, has been researching real-time video and voice clones. He was inspired by a recent $25 million scam involving a deepfake video call.
The scam involved a Hong Kong-based finance professional who thought he was seeing and speaking to his London- based CFO. Instead, he was conversing with a real-time deepfake, which tricked him into making a $25 million wire transfer.
Kovacs decided to test the feasibility of creating a deepfake using only public information available on the internet. He recruited Bishop Fox colleague Alethe Denis and used publicly available footage of her to train machine learning models.
The result is a real-time video that appears to be Denis, but is actually Kovacs sitting in what appears to be Denis’ home office. The duo even routed the outputs of the deepfake video and voice as camera and microphone inputs for Microsoft Teams, allowing them to have a live video call with Denis’ children who believed they were speaking with their mom.
Kovacs will demonstrate his “studio in a box” at DEF CON, which includes wigs, lights, a green screen, and other equipment. Attendees will be able to test it out and see how easy it is to create real-time deepfakes.
The goal is not just to entertain, but also to raise awareness about the potential risks of deepfakes in social engineering attacks. Kovacs will also demonstrate a deepfake detection tool being developed by DARPA’s Semantic Forensics program.
The AI village program aims to develop semantic technologies for analyzing media and create detection algorithms to determine if video, audio, images, and text have been generated or manipulated. An attribution algorithm that determines the origin of media is also in development.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/04/realtime_deepfakes_defcon/