Working towards digital archive transparency
The legitimacy of an online document today is bound to the way it has been retrieved: From a reputable source, through an authenticated communication. However, as primary sources become unavailable, digital archives and other third-party repositories emerge as sole witnesses that some documents ever existed, or that their content have not been altered. The proliferation of tools able to produce large amounts of convincing fakes, as well as current incentives for bad actors to leverage these technologies, may eventually threaten the trust placed in these archives and finally question the genuineness of historical records.
In this talk, we explore how existing technologies such as the Certificate Transparency, may be leveraged to establish a robust foundation for digital archive integrity and observability. We then present our on-going effort to develop libre and open-source tools to build and maintain such transparency logs, as well as other integrations with existing standards for trusted timestamping and web archiving.
