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Is there any concept of signing data at time of archive, and verification at time of access, to prove it is not later tampered with, say by a bribed sysadmin?
by lrvick 2y ago
Is there any concept of signing data at time of archive, and verification at time of access, to prove it is not later tampered with, say by a bribed sysadmin?
Similarly are there any general supply chain integrity measures in place, such as code review of dependencies, reproducible builds, or creating archives reproducibly in independently administrated enclaves?
You note archives could be used for instances like Supreme Court decisions, so any anyone with power to tamper with content would certainly be targeted.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoAnd put the signatures on a blockchain so that the perma.cc holders, or the USA government, can't do easily alter things either.
- JackC 2y agoWe're coauthors on the wacz-auth spec, which is designed to solve this sort of thing by signing archives with the domain cert of the archive that created them. If you cross-sign with a private cert you can do pretty well with this approach against various threat models, though it has to be part of a whole PKI security design. I think the best approach for high stakes archiving is to have a standard for "witness APIs" so that you could fetch archives from independent archiving institutions. That also solves for the web looking different from different places. That hasn't gelled yet, though.
- makeworld 2y agoWACZ files created by WebRecorder software like archiveweb.page are signed (by you) and timestamped (by a third party using RFC 3161).