As AI transparency regulations and media provenance standards come into effect around the globe, determining content provenance has become a crucial requirement for modern media applications. To support developers in building high-performance provenance tools, today we are introducing Credentio, an open-source C++ library designed for working with Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) Content Credentials, starting with specification versions 2.2 and 2.4. This is the same code that has powered nearly 40 different conformant C2PA-enabled Google products to scale to tens of billions of generated assets, including images, videos, audio files, and documents across many file formats.
Local-First Validation for Performance, Privacy, and Scalability
Credentio provides an API designed to run completely locally within developer applications. This removes the need to send media files to cloud servers for validation, which incurs privacy, latency, bandwidth, and file size limitations.
With Credentio, media files never need to be transmitted back to Google or external validation endpoints while offering :
- Zero Bandwidth Overhead: By validating media files locally Credentio eliminates external data transmission requirements.
- Instant Validation Verdicts: By validating media files locally, Credentio minimizes verification latency and delivers immediate results even in high-throughput workflows.
- Complete Data Privacy: Media contents remain securely within your local environment.
Validating provenance records in large digital assets—such as multi-gigabyte video files or high-resolution imagery—presents computational and resource challenges for traditional libraries. Credentio was engineered specifically to solve these performance bottlenecks.
Credentio uses significantly less memory than other solutions when validating large files. Whether validating small images or video files reaching multiple gigabytes in size, Credentio maintains a small memory footprint. This makes it ideal for integrating into resource-constrained client applications, server pipelines, or high-performance edge software.
Detailed Validation & Flexible Trust Management
Currently, Credentio focuses on validating Content Credentials with precision. Developers can pass custom or the official C2PA trust lists directly through the API to evaluate credential authenticity against known authorities.
Credentio’s key validation capabilities include:
- Trust List Integration: Supporting configurable trust lists, including the official C2PA Trust List and C2PA TSA Trust List.
- Comprehensive Parsing: Deep inspection of manifests, assertions, digital signatures, and claim structures embedded within media files.
- Detailed Verdict Reports: Clear, actionable validation results pinpointing exact verification statuses and potential integrity errors.
Built for Developers & Looking to the Future
Credentio is tailored specifically for developers seeking to build performant, enterprise-grade C2PA validator products. Whether you are building desktop apps, mobile software, or backend media processing services, Credentio simplifies C2PA compliance without compromising speed or control.
As the C2PA specification continues to evolve, so will Credentio. We look forward to advancing the library alongside community needs and we plan to expand Credentio beyond validation—introducing full capabilities to generate Content Credentials and seamlessly embed them directly into media files.
Get Started & Contribute
Credentio is now available as an open-source project. You can access the repository today at mediaprovenance.googlesource.com.
We welcome contributions from the developer community! Whether you are interested in submitting bug fixes, adding new features, or optimizing performance, we invite developers, security researchers, and media ecosystem partners to collaborate with us and help shape the future of local C2PA validation.
