# Combating Fake News with Cryptography in Quantum Era with Post-Quantum Verifiable Image Proofs
## 1 Introduction
The spread of AI-generated images and edited photos, including those created with tools like Adobe Photoshop, highlights the growing difficulties social networks face in combating misinformation. These platforms are designed for rapid information sharing and often prioritize speed and engagement over content verification. This environment allows manipulated images to go viral, triggering strong emotional reactions and leading to their widespread distribution before fact-checking occurs. A key challenge is the lack of provenance for many images appearing online. Users often trust content without clear indicators of its authenticity, making it difficult to distinguish real from fabricated visuals. Social media algorithms prioritize engagement-driven content, sometimes amplifying misleading or sensational imagery over accurate information. The rise of AI-generated images has also rendered traditional fact-checking methods, such as reverse image searches, less effective. These technologies enable the creation of highly realistic yet entirely fabricated visuals, complicating efforts to verify authenticity. As a result, misinformation can spread unchecked and erode public trust in online information. Addressing this issue requires new solutions to verify the authenticity of visual content on social networks. One proposed approach is the use of cryptographic verification techniques. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2 PA, has developed a system where each photo is digitally signed at the moment it is taken, embedding crucial metadata, such as location, focal length, and exposure settings. Major brands, like Sony, Nikon, and Leica, have begun incorporating this capability into their cameras. Some companies, including OpenAI, have also started adding similar certification to AI-generated images to ensure proper attribution [4]. Ideally, users could verify a photo's authenticity by checking its C2 PA signature. However, in practice, images on social media are often modified. They are cropped, blurred for privacy, resized, or converted to grayscale before being shared. These edits disrupt the original digital signature, making verification difficult. C2 PA currently recommends that modifications be made using approved tools that generate a new signature after edits. However, this approach shifts the trust from the original camera to the editing software and does not integrate well with open-source tools that lack secure key protection. A better solution is needed, one that allows social media users to verify whether an edited image still originates from an authenticated source. This means ensuring that the original photo was properly signed, that only permitted changes, such as cropping, blurring, or resizing, were made, and that key details remain intact. This comprehensive verification process is known as glass-to-glass security. Our research explores how combining content provenance standards with cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs can address these challenges. By digitally signing images with vital metadata and enabling the verification of approved edits without exposing sensitive information, we propose a framework that can help social networks combat misinformation more effectively. This paper reviews existing methods for verifying the authenticity of edited images and introduces a model that enables the automatic validation of uploaded photos from capture to display. In our paper, we refer to the VerITAS technology [5], provide a deep analysis of it, and propose a novel methodology to enhance its security against quantum attacks. We refer to our result as Post-Quantum VerITAS. In this work, we extend the VerITAS framework and introduce Post-Quantum VerITAS, a novel system for verifying image authenticity and permissible transformations using quantum-resistant cryptographic primitives.