Sasha SafeShare Technology

The engine

An AI-based technology for adding and retrieving hidden signatures into images (encoding) and reading them back out (decoding).

The registry

A highly scalable, anonymous "registry" of signatures that functions as a centralized ledger of all signatures embedded in the images.

Combined the SafeShare engine and registry form the backbone of a new image protection paradigm that enables any content owner to define whether an image can be shared or not based on the permissions embedded in an image.

Signatures: an advanced form of invisible watermarks (and much more)

The signature is a globally unique identifier that intrinsically links to the pixels of a specific image and stays within the image. It is invisible and can not be read by humans - only by our decoder. Unique signatures are the key elements of the SafeShare engine and let content owners encode into an image whether it can be re-shared by others or not.

Robust against tampering

A signature is extremely hard to copy or forge. It survives screen shots, cropping, rotation, and heavy compression. Even if you take a photo of it, the signature can still be decoded and identify the unique image.

Cropped photo of hikers at sunset - SASHA

Works on-device

We have designed the AI-models and image processing algorithms so they can run in less than a second on mobile devices. This allows images to be assigned without the image ever leaving the user's device.

Running on-device not only ensures 100% privacy, but also ensures that there are no AI-infrastructure costs involved for platforms adopting SafeShare. Try to encode an image in our app.

The Registry ensures that we do not store any data that could be associated with individuals. It never processes the image, nor any information describing the image, such as where it was taken or shared.

The registry only stores following information:

The signature itself
When the signature was created
What company or system that issued the signature on behalf of a user or entity
Optionally, metadata on in what context an image can or cannot be used

The contents of the registry can be safely shared between partners such as tech platforms who wish to participate in ensuring that images are not misused.

Scalability

We can scale cost-efficiently to trillions of signatures without loss of robustness and speed, because it is designed in a way that scales massively. This way we can handle all the needs for safe image sharing in the world.

Built in compliance

As the registry only holds fully anonymised data, large-scale partners can choose to synchronize its contents onto their own infrastructure without compliance risks.

Compact signatures and novel search algorithms

The signatures themselves are extremely compact: each signature is only a couple of hundred bytes. Therefore, 10’s of billions of signatures can be stored on a normal computer hard drive or even a high-end mobile phone.

Automated Identification of signatures

We have solved the challenge of identifying (potentially damaged) signatures effectively, so this operation can be performed at scale. This involves novel searching algorithms that are both efficient and can work in parallel across many servers.