Authenticated Contradictions from Desynchronized Provenance and Watermarking
The research formalizes an 'Integrity Clash' where a digital asset has both a valid human authorship C2PA manifest and an invisible AI-generated watermark, with both signals passing their individual checks. The study shows that standard editing workflows can create these 'Authenticated Fakes.' A new cross-layer audit protocol is proposed to detect this contradiction perfectly, proving the gap between the two verification layers is unnecessary and easily closed by joint evaluation.