Paper 2026/1308

Trust the Voice, Hide the Source: Anonymous Provenance for Verifiably Edited Audio

Abstract

As synthetic speech becomes increasingly realistic, the need to authenticate audio recordings has become more urgent. Such authentication should allow a released recording to demonstrate that it was captured by an authorized device and modified only through the declared edits, while concealing both the unreleased content and the identity of the particular recorder. In this work, we propose PPAAS, a privacy-preserving framework for authenticated audio editing under a formal security model. The framework integrates a privacy-preserving capture-authentication scheme and a specialized zero-knowledge proof protocol for authenticated editing. The capture-authentication scheme establishes that the recording was produced by an authorized device group while concealing both the unreleased content and the individual recorder. The proof protocol certifies that the published audio results from a valid editing process and that the declared edits were applied correctly, while avoiding general-purpose circuit conversion and redundant proof generation over the full recording. It also naturally supports a broad class of audio transformations. We implement PPAAS and benchmark it against a general-purpose zkSNARK baseline for the same edit relations. The results show that our capture-authentication scheme is practical for resource-constrained recording devices, and for a $2^{14}$-sample removal from a $2^{19}$-sample recording, our proof protocol achieves $398\times$ faster proof generation and $160\times$ faster verification, reduces prover peak memory by over $1600\times$, and produces a $45\%$ smaller proof than the baseline.