Video Handshake

The video handshake is FreedomCore’s primary trust ceremony. It accounts for half the maximum trust score because it is the only signal that cannot be automated at scale.

Payment can be scripted. Email can be faked. Professional licences can be looked up. But sitting on a live video call with another human, having them confirm “I know this person” — that requires a real relationship.

The Flow

  1. Alice and Bob are both on the mesh (Guest Pass or higher)
  2. Either initiates a video call (WebRTC peer-to-peer over Nebula)
  3. Both see an “I’ve met this person” button
  4. Both tap the button within 30 seconds of each other
  5. A mutual certificate is created and stored on both devices
  6. Trust level increases for both parties

What the Certificate Contains

  • Both public keys and device fingerprints
  • Timestamp and call duration
  • City-level geolocation (not precise coordinates)
  • Links to previous handshakes between these parties
  • Both signatures

No video is stored. Certificates are historical facts, not recordings.

Why Video

Video is hard to fake at scale. A single deepfake video might fool one person once. But creating thousands of convincing real-time deepfakes, each holding a natural conversation with a different person, each from a consistent geographic location, over months — that is not economically viable for an attacker.

The security comes from accumulation: one handshake is worth 10 trust points. Five handshakes over six months, from the same city, with colleagues who also have chains — that pattern is nearly impossible to manufacture.

Certificate Chains

Certificates are immutable snapshots. New certificates reference old ones via hash:

Cert #1 (Jan 2026, hash: abc123)
  → Cert #2 (Mar 2026, prev: abc123)
    → Cert #3 (Jun 2026, prev: def456)

Consistent relationships over time build stronger trust. Device changes are visible. Bad actors have thin, suspicious chains. This is the only useful part of blockchain — append-only, cryptographically linked history — without the cryptocurrency, mining, or speculation.

Security Properties

  • Real-time liveness prevents replay attacks
  • 30-second timestamp window plus nonce prevents certificate reuse
  • Each new handshake links to previous ones, building a verifiable chain
  • Deepfake detection via liveness checks planned for future versions