Yes, but not only.

We trust documents we find online because they look authentic or because we found them in a website that seems legitimate. It is impossible to distinguish documents stored by a honest third-party from convincing fakes with backdated metadata.

Building trust is not straightforward and threats are materializing while people argue on how to fix this. Soon enough, in the next few years, it will be too late.

Let's stop arguing. Let's get the archives to publish all the cryptographic digests of their items on their website. Any format, any standard, make the hashes public.

Then, people can build their own defenses using this, without waiting for adoption of any kind of standards. Publishing enables fast progress for everyone, right now.

Making the archives transparent is how everyone together solve this!

Stop waiting: just do it yourself right now, make all the digests public!

Do not wait for consensus or a single best solution!

Yes, this would be best done with shared industry standards build as commons, but coordination is hard. This makes all of us vulnerable.

What you can do without waiting is taking any kind of records in any format, with any kind of useful digests of existing items, and make that public, today.

History yesterday was built out of a wide diversity of narrators in a wide diversity of formats. Keeping integrity private on "fear of doing it twice" does not work.

What works, is publishing the digests: let anyone be a narrator for tomorrow!

If you want a tentative idea on how to do it, see below:

• If you already publish your cryptographic digests, explain how to access them:

  https://example.com/.well-known/digests/howto.txt

• If you don't, do not complicate this, just copy files containing digests in:

  https://example.com/.well-known/digests/today/

• Any format or file that contains the following can be useful:
  • the

    sha256

    digest of items;
  • the

    byte size

    of items, it helps verifiers;
  • the

    blake3

    digest if you can: have two secure hashes;
  • any

    md5

    ,

    sha1

    , file name or object identifier for cross-reference.
• Avoid any information that can hold a legal risk:

  give away only the minimum!

What matters is making it accessible and letting people pick up the task of building their own defenses today. There will be time after to argue about standards.

This will not happen without you publishing digests first!

Because we are all late to the party.

The need for authentication in the archival landscape has long been known. The LOCKSS project drafted its threat model two decades ago, the LTANS working group concluded fifteen years ago, and Webrecorder integrates trusted timestamping.

However, most data online today is still not obviously authenticated. Scale is hard, budgets are small and issues like copyright are limits that stop content-oriented approaches. Today bad actors have all the capabilities to leverage these weaknesses.

We strongly believe that making the integrity public is the path forward.

The solution to this must integrates on top of existing item repositories. Anyone needs to be able to build today a tamper-evident index of their own artifacts, but also of their favorite archives, in a way fit for long-term storage.

We also believe that transparency logs are perfect for this!

We believe that the ideas underlying Certificate Transparency, Sigsum and Sigstore can be adapted to build tamper-evident historical records for all. They are tracking every year billions of records in transparency logs.

There exists many standards for digital archives, each pairing items to their metadata in their own ways. Let's not propose replacing these standards.

Let's propose to append supplemental index files, text-based, capturing just enough metadata together with cryptographic hashes, signatures and trusted timestamps. We want to empower anyone to build and share these indexes, public by default.

We deliberately keep things simple, you don't need a blockchain for this!

This is not any kind of root of trust.

Here distributed governance is key. In many ways, transparency logs help distribute trust between national institutions, non-profits, and individuals.

Let people be their own source of trust, you do not need more!

Let's design to integrate with the existing transparency ecosystem. Let's also design recovery paths from log corruption and integrate several backup plans.

This will require transparency-enforcing tools and clients. We want to enable anyone to write their own. This requires open standards and we aim to assist the wider archiving community at making fast progress on transparency.

Let's enable both the small and large scale by enabling clients to interact offline with the index. Making this public by default is how this gets solved!

Let's enable anyone to protect their own favorite archives, large or small, and build tamper-evident logs of the artifacts they care about.

This is shared infrastructure for the future.

The problems surrounding digital archives can be described as century-scale.

This can not aim to solve everything revolving around digital archives, but should aim to bring into the long-term innovations like tamper-evident logs.

Scaling file formats and protocols to several decades is not a trivial task as no one can predict the future. This is in some fundamental way a guess.

We still believe that some meaningful choices exist, from using text files, making everything paper-printable, to careful choices of technology.

Call it a ledger if you want!

Blockchain technologies spawned many innovations making full use of modern cryptography. However, we are solving for a different kind of problem. Yes, it is an append-only immutable trees of hashes. No, we are not building a blockchain.

We believe here that the limiting factor is not good cryptography!

We are making opinionated choices specific to long-term digital preservation and believe that transparency logs are a better fit for this. We also believe that blockchain-based notary services may have some role to play.

But society cannot afford to rely on them.

This is still in the early stages of the project.

We are currently working on a prototype to experiment with the design space available to us. The short term goal is to build a small-scale deployment.

We invite you to contact us to help us scale to billions of records!