This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Security Business magazine. Feel free to share, and please don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter.
Those are some heady, advanced technologies, but to boil it down, Crawforth explains that they combine to create unhackable, evidentiary-quality digital video as it is being recorded. Its patented framework maps and hashes layers of security directly into media in real-time, frame-by-frame, capturing and embedding key details like location, time, and method of recording into literally every pixel and sound byte of the video.
Every frame is permanently protected during recording – not after – taking the digital DNA of the video and mapping it directly into a blockchain, multiple times per second.
Digital DNA isn’t simply a GPS coordinate and a timestamp. “We know the direction it is pointing, the speed, the altitude – even the Earth’s geomagnetic field that’s unique to the location. We know the tilt of the camera down to a hundredth of a degree.” Crawforth explains.
“If we wanted to create technology to be the counterpunch to AI, we better use a damn good technology,” Crawforth says. “Our technology takes a video, recreates all the ‘digital DNA,’ and then takes it to the blockchain, comparing it frame-by-frame and second-by-second. If a single pixel is changed, it won’t match. You may not know exactly what was changed in the video, but you will know that a particular segment has been modified.”
Hear from Swear Founder Jason Crawforth live from the CES show floor!
When any Swear-protected media is replayed, those modifications are instantly flagged, and the full video is given a confidence score on its authenticity.
“Unlike traditional forensic methods, our approach is proactive, working in real-time to protect digital content,” Crawforth adds.
The goal is to take digital recordings – whether via video, photo, audio, video conference, teleconference, a surveillance camera, body cam, or cellphone; in fact, anything that produces a digital asset – and create unhackable digital DNA that can be written to blockchain for authentication.
The result is a video displayed on a typical VMS-like screen, but with validated blockchain proof that it is real from a visual, audio, and metadata perspective.
The best part is that even though the video includes all of this digital DNA, it adds what Crawforth says is maybe one-thousandth of a percentage to the video’s actual size.
Why it Matters in the Security Industry
At this point, it would be a fair assumption that this technology is needed in the broader sense, but many video surveillance professionals – especially on the manufacturing side – would argue that this technology isn’t needed in security. After all, surveillance video is often encrypted on the camera and then decrypted by the VMS with a never-published key.
Crawforth is ready for this argument. “We believe that if you use media exclusively as its own security, it will be compromised – maybe not today, but advances in quantum computing could make it very possible to crack encryption keys tomorrow,” he says.
More importantly, surveillance video will be useless unless it can be 100% verified for use as evidence in court. Crawforth admits that most of the video surveillance content recording today is admissible in court; however, he adds: “I believe the content that the 90 million surveillance cameras that are recording in this country right now is not going to be admissible in court within the next three to four years or less. I’m speculating, but at some point, someone is going to have the money and the means to manipulate [evidentiary video]. It is going to happen, and when it does, what do you think it’s going to do to the security industry? Nothing is going to be admissible.”
Like many technologies at CES, Swear’s is still in its infancy; however, Crawforth says it is poised to become the security industry’s independent video notary, noting that it is important to get in front of the problem before AI and quantum computing pulls so far ahead that it leaves the surveillance industry wondering what happened.
His first phase is to embed Swear into software – specifically VMS. “Running on a VMS, writing in the blockchain, it becomes an enterprise tool that says take any video from any provider and validates it,” Crawforth says. “Then, we will eventually be able to have conversations with the camera manufacturers.”
He adds: “It is going to take time to create a standard. We will start talking with SIA and others, but it goes back to that one question: How many companies are developing technologies to defend against AI? It’s zero. AI is a sword, and everyone’s using it as a sword. But what happens when it’s used as a sword against you? You have to be able to defend against it.”
This was Crawforth’s vision when he was first confronted with the deepfake threat. While it is still early in the company’s journey, his passion for it is palpable. “When we started this, it wasn’t just to build a billion-dollar company,” he says. “This was to prosecute the guilty, exonerate the innocent, and save reputations and careers. We want to bring security and surveillance past where we are today, and essentially, take AI out of the formula.”
