A Survey on Proactive Deepfake Defense: Disruption and Watermarking

The rapid proliferation of generative AI has led to led to unprecedented capabilities in synthesizing realistic deepfakes (DFs) across multiple modalities. This raises significant concerns regarding privacy, security, and copyright protection. Unlike passive detection approaches that operate after DFs have been created and distributed, proactive defense mechanisms aim to prevent the generation of malicious synthetic content at its source. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of current proactive DF defense strategies, including Disruption and Watermarking. Disruption approaches protect individuals’ data by introducing imperceptible perturbations that prevent unauthorized exploitation by generative models, while watermarking approaches embed verifiable messages into data or models to enable content authentication and attribution. We also analyze proactive approaches across various evaluation metrics (imperceptibility, protectability/detectability, transferability, traceability, and robustness), and examine their effectiveness in real-world settings. Furthermore, we review the evolution of DF generation techniques, highlighting their rapid developments. Finally, we identify key challenges and promising future research directions to enhance proactive defense mechanisms.