Surf Security Puts Deepfake Detection In A Browser

Good idea that actually works

Nov 20, 2024 by

Surf Security LogoSurf Security has come out with a good idea, a browser with deepfake audio detection built in. SemiAccurate tested their Deepwater AI detector and, well, it seems to work.

Surf Security’s main product is a zero trust browser, basically a hardened browser with a bunch of features built in for enterprise security. Since this isn’t SemiAccurate’s main focus, we won’t go into much of the details but the idea is pretty obvious. Harden the browser your employees use and you can radically lower one of the main attack surfaces for the bad guys.

With Deepwater, Surf added a plugin to their main product that detects audio deepfakes with pretty solid accuracy. The claim of up to 98% accuracy is hard to verify but in the brief time SemiAccurate used it, the accuracy was 100%. Remember that it is only for audio but that can be the most nefarious use of deepfakes, video is much easier to spot.

Surf Security Deepfake detection plugin

Is watermarking Bill Gates on your bucket list too? :)

Going to YouTube and searching for “deepfake” came up with a lot and the learning curve was scaled pretty quickly. As we mentioned above, Deepwater detects audio deepfakes, most of the examples we looked at were real audio coupled with deepfake video or real clips edited with ill intent,. Since Deepwater isn’t designed to find these, well, it didn’t. That said when there was deepfake audio, it seemed to detect it fairly well.

The Deepwater plugin is manually called up but we can see a near term future where it runs transparently in the background. That said it is one click, a brief wait while it records the audio, and a couple of seconds later you have a result. There were a few minor audio glitches while the plugin wa recording and analyzing but it is completely ignorable. One thing we really liked about the result is that is wasn’t just a colored symbol, it gave a confidence level as well. This can be really useful for borderline cases, especially if you have used the plugin a bit and get a feel on where the range usually lands. In any case it seemed to work quite well.

So why would you want such a tool? Do we really need to answer that? If you are a Surf Security customer, you can add this to plugin to your browser. If you aren’t, well, lets hope they release it as a product for us unwashed masses, it could be very useful for people doing research and fact checking the increasing wave of stupid that is filling the Intertubes.

All in all it looks like Deepwater is the start of things to come. Hopefully this tech, or similar, will become ubiquitous enough to blunt the wave of deepfakes. All you need to do is make it less profitable for the bad guys to make them and the problem will self-regulate. Surf Security has now taken the first step, or at least the first step we know of, to curb the problem. Onwards and upwards from here.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate