Project Starling is a joint effort developed by the USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering. The initiative’s goal is to develop a set of tools and principles to be used across non-profit organizations, news outlets, and industry experts to solve challenges when it comes to the uncertainty of the media we see today and our enduring effort to preserve the truth.

Starling provides an open-source, end-to-end framework for application developers and participants to step through the media generation and verification process. The framework takes advantage of innovations in blockchain and distributed ledger technology and consists of three modules: capturing the image, storing the information, and verifying its authenticity. Implementations of the Starling framework include Hala Systems, Numbers Protocol, and the USC Shoah Foundation. Collectively, applications and outlets leveraging the Starling framework have added cryptographically verifiable proof to over 250 images throughout the 2020 US Presidential Election and 55,000 holocaust testimonials, ensuring that their validity and references are never in question.

Verifiable records on Hedera

The Starling framework leverages multiple decentralized technologies including IPFS, GUN, Hyperledger Fabric, and Hedera Hashgraph throughout its process. For each piece of media captured the framework is designed to store images on IPFS, using Filecoin, these image's associated metadata is then stored in a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network, securely protecting any sensitive information. Finally, to provide the highest guarantees of assurance that the underlying metadata has not been tampered with, the Starling Framework wanted to leverage a public ledger, ultimately selecting Hedera.

For each media file, a hash of the information stored in Hyperledger Fabric is taken and recorded on the public Hedera network. By so doing 3rd parties are able to more readily trust the application owner, nor any bad actor has falsified or modified results after the fact. Events such as the ones captured by the Starling framework are easily and cost-effectively managed using the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS). An event-based messaging system, HCS allows for developers to integrate any application and send arbitrary data to the Hedera network. Upon achieving consensus, these events receive a consensus timestamp allowing for outside parties to readily verify their information such as who sent the event and when it was recorded.