Content Credentials
Content Credentials is the consumer-facing brand name for the provenance information — creator, editing history, AI involvement — attached to an image, video, or document under the C2PA standard. When you see a small "Cr" icon on a photo in Adobe Photoshop, LinkedIn, or a participating news outlet, that icon is exposing an underlying C2PA manifest as a Content Credential. The name refers to the branded, user-visible presentation of provenance data, not a separate technology from C2PA.
Content Credentials vs. C2PA: what's the difference?
C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) is the open technical standard and industry coalition — Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, the BBC, and others — that defines how a provenance manifest is structured, signed, and verified. Content Credentials is the label and icon that surfaces that manifest to an end user in a readable way, driven largely by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), which builds open-source tooling around the C2PA spec. In short: C2PA is the specification, Content Credentials is the product experience built on top of it, and the two terms are often — imprecisely — used interchangeably.
What a Content Credential actually contains
A Content Credential is a human-readable view of a C2PA manifest: who or what created the asset, what editing tools touched it, and whether AI generation was involved, all bound to the file with a cryptographic signature so tampering can be detected. Like any C2PA manifest, it can be signed with classical algorithms such as RSA, ECDSA, or Ed25519 — the credential is only as trustworthy as the signature and its issuer, not the icon itself. See C2PA vs. post-quantum signatures for how that compares to Certivu's approach.
Source: C2PA: Content Credentials overview
FAQ
Is Content Credentials the same thing as C2PA?
Not exactly. C2PA is the open standard; Content Credentials is the branded, user-facing presentation of the provenance data that standard defines — the icon and panel you actually see. Every Content Credential is built on a C2PA manifest, but the name refers to the consumer-facing product, not the specification.
Who created Content Credentials?
Content Credentials is driven by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), one of the organizations that helped found C2PA alongside Microsoft, Intel, the BBC, Sony, and other members. CAI builds the open-source tooling and consumer-facing icon; C2PA governs the underlying specification.
Does Certivu use Content Credentials?
Certivu embeds a real, ML-DSA-signed C2PA manifest into JPEG and PNG content, which is structurally interoperable with Content Credentials displays, and reads third-party C2PA manifests on verification. Standard C2PA-aware viewers may report Certivu's post-quantum signature algorithm as unrecognized today, since Content Credentials tooling is generally built around classical signature algorithms.