CAI Releases Suite of Open-Source Tools to Advance Digital Content Provenance

By Andy Parsons, CAI Senior Director

Since our inception, the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) has been committed to bringing digital content provenance to audiences everywhere. Today, we are excited to announce that we have released a suite of open-source developer tools – implementing the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) specification released earlier this year – that will further this commitment and enable a broad developer community to integrate content provenance across web, desktop, or mobile projects, regardless of their location or level of technical depth with the comprehensive C2PA technical specification. 

The three tools that will be made available today are: 

• JavaScript SDK – This UI toolkit includes everything developers need to create rich, browser-based experiences displaying content credentials. 

• C2PA Tool – Developers can install this utility to create, verify, and explore content credentials on their command line, or wrap it into a service to quickly equip their processes to interact with content provenance.  

• Rust SDK – Developers can build custom applications across desktop, mobile, and services that create, verify, and display content credentials directly via our powerful Rust library. 

This is a huge milestone for the CAI that builds upon decades of open standards experience at Adobe. Adobe is a longstanding pioneer of open standards and platform-agnostic software products and technology such as XMP, PDF, XDM, and Magento Open Source. Open standards are core to the company’s mission and vision, and a value shared by CAI members. Being active in open-source communities enables CAI to empower developers around the world to create interoperable solutions, native to their applications, that will help advance the adoption of content provenance across a wide array of use cases. We can’t wait to see what the community builds with these raw materials. 

Learn More: Attend the Workshop   

We are hosting an in-depth virtual workshop on Thursday, June 16, 12PM ET to kick off an ongoing dialogue with the developer community on their needs, areas where we can improve the tooling, and how we can encourage widespread adoption, together. We’ll be exploring these new products in more detail, including a walkthrough of the UX guidelines, use cases, and trust signals these tools enable. If you’re a developer, product leader, designer, or business leader interested in transparency and trust online, please register for the event here and join us on June 16. 

CAI Progress and What’s Next 

Today’s announcement is the latest step forward in our work to address the pervasive issue of misinformation and disinformation across the digital ecosystem, empowering creators to develop and share their stories with proper attribution and protection. In late 2021, we released Adobe’s Content Credentials feature – available to all Creative Cloud subscribers across key Adobe products and workflows, notably as an opt-in feature in Photoshop. These tools help establish authorship for creators, foster transparency within digital media and bolster trust in content (images, video, other digital formats) by adding robust, tamper-evident provenance data about how a piece of content was produced, edited, and published.  

Earlier this year, we also saw the culmination of our collaboration with the outstanding partners of the C2PA in the public release of the open technical specification for digital provenance, which provides apps and platforms with a blueprint defining a core trust model and its application to various types of content (e.g., images, videos, audio, or documents). The C2PA also provides deep guidance on how that information is presented and stored, and how verification is accomplished. The work to hone experiences, preserve privacy and counter misuse scenarios is ongoing and developing guidance will be reflected in the evolution of the CAI open-source tools. 

As we move forward, we will continue to add to our growing community of over 750 members, which now includes The Associated Press, Nikon, and The Wall Street Journal. We will continue to pursue wide-scale adoption of CAI ideals through creator and consumer education. And today we’re forming a new developer-focused facet of the CAI community, building on our collective effort to increase trust and transparency online, now through open-source code.  

We welcome feedback and contributions. Grab the code and let’s get started.