Signing Right Away

Abstract: The proliferation of high-fidelity synthetic media, coupled with exploitable hardware vulnerabilities in conventional imaging pipelines, has precipitated a crisis of trust in digital content. Existing countermeasures, from post-hoc classifiers to software-based signing, fail to address the fundamental challenge of establishing an unbreakable link to reality at the moment of capture. This whitepaper introduces Signing Right Away (SRA), a comprehensive security architecture that guarantees the provenance of digital media from "silicon to silicon to signed file." SRA leverages a four-pillar security model-Confidentiality, Integrity, Authentication, and Replay Protection, akin to the MIPI Camera Security Framework (CSF), but also extends its scope beyond the internal data bus to the creation of a cryptographically sealed, C2PA-compliant final asset. By securing the entire imaging pipeline within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), SRA ensures that every captured image and video carries an immutable, verifiable proof of origin. This provides a foundational solution for industries reliant on trustworthy visual information, including journalism, legal evidence, and insurance. We present the SRA architecture, a detailed implementation roadmap informed by empirical prototyping, and a comparative analysis that positions SRA as the essential "last mile" in the chain of content trust.