Deepfake & impersonation defense
The cost of cloning an executive's voice, face and writing style is now a Tuesday-evening project. The defense is older than the threat.
A CFO at a mid-cap European industrial firm receives a video call from his CEO. Same face, same voice, same nervous tic of taking his glasses off mid-sentence. The CEO needs an urgent wire to close a sensitive acquisition. The CFO authorises the transfer. The "CEO" was a model running on a laptop in another time zone.
That story is from 2024. The price of producing that call has dropped by an order of magnitude every year since.
What signatures actually defend against
Cryptographic signatures don't stop AI from generating a video of you. They do something better: they make every real statement you make independently verifiable, so the fake ones stand out.
The defensive logic is the same as DKIM on email. We didn't stop phishing emails from being sent. We made the legitimate ones cryptographically marked, so anything unsigned became suspicious by default.
What an executive signs
- Public posts. Every LinkedIn statement carries a signed block. A screenshot circulating without one is visibly unverified.
- Press statements and quotes. Journalists can verify the exact wording came from you, not from a press-release-shaped hallucination.
- Internal "this is really me" channels. A signed message in a finance approval workflow beats a phone call from someone who sounds like you.
- Photos and slide decks. C2PA-compatible signing puts a tamper seal on the media itself.
What happens if you don't
Nothing, until it matters. The first time a fabricated quote attributed to you moves a stock price, or a fabricated video of you reaches a board, the question won't be "is this real?" — it'll be "where's the version we can verify?" Executives who already sign will produce one. Executives who don't will have nothing to point at.
The good news
Nothing changes in your day-to-day. Posts feel the same to write. Statements feel the same to publish. The signing happens in the background — the receipts pile up silently — and the first crisis where it matters, the infrastructure is already there.