Nowadays, the Internet is indispensable when it comes to information dissemination. People rely on the Internet to inform themselves on current news events, as well as to verify facts. We, as a community, are quickly approaching an 'electronic information age' where the majority of information will be distributed electronically and tools to preserve this information will become essential. While archiving online digital information is a good way to preserve online information for future generations, it has many disadvantages including the easy manipulation of archived information, e.g. by the archiving authority. Online information is also prone to getting hacked or being taken offline. Therefore, it is necessary that archived online news information is securely time-stamped with the date and time when it was first archived in a way that cannot be manipulated. The process of 'trusted timestamping' is an established approach for claiming that particular digital information existed at a particular 'point in time' in the past. However, traditional approaches for trusted timestamping depend on the time-stamping authority's fidelity. Directly embedding the hash of a digital file into the blockchain of a cryptocurrency is a more recent method that allows for secure time-stamping, since digital information is stored as part of the transaction information in, e.g. Bitcoin's, blockchain, and not stored at a centralized time-stamping authority. However, there is no system yet available, which uses this approach for archiving and time-stamping online news articles. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to develop a system that 1) enables decentralized trusted time-stamping of web and news articles as a means of making future manipulation of online information identifiable, and 2) allows users to determine the authenticity of articles by checking different versions of the same article online.
Directly embedding the hash of a digital file into the blockchain of a cryptocurrency is a more recent method that allows for secure time-stamping, since digital information is stored as part of the transaction information in, e.g. Bitcoin's, blockchain, and not stored at a centralized time-stamping authority. However, there is no system yet available, which uses this approach for archiving and time-stamping online news articles. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to develop a system that (1) enables decentralized trusted time-stamping of web and news articles as a means of making future manipulation of online information identifiable, and (2) allows users to determine the authenticity of articles by checking different versions of the same article online. The system's usability is evaluated by analyzing the difficulties faced by participants in a usability study and improving upon the identified issues. Table 2- shows average severity rating of all the tasks given to the study participants as well as the average severity rating for all the participants ................54
Information that is available online can change quickly. According to an estimate, in one year, 80% of pages on the Internet are updated with changes and 60% pages are newly added [4]. There may also be different problems, such as unavailable content. After one year on the internet, only one fourth of the links are available.
Web archives play a vital role in preserving digital information. They preserve digital information at set intervals and digitize non-digital information for future generations. As a result, knowledge can be preserved for years to come. However, at the moment, despite web archiving services, the existence of digital information in a certain state at a point in the past cannot be verified or proved by a secure means that is independent of the web archiving service.
Most information published on the Web claims that it was existent at a certain point in time, for example in the form of an online magazine’s provided publishing date. Most news sources nowadays are only digital and not present in a physical form, for instance as a newspaper or magazine. Hence, they could claim particular online information existed at a particular point in time, or they could manipulate it later and claim that it is authentic. Furthermore, content from information sources like Wikipedia is constantly being changed and we have no method to keep track of changes in the content. The content of Wikipedia is of particular interest for the people of different domains.
Currently, there is no way to verify whether a news website’s claim to unmanipulated content is legitimate or not, because information available online could be overwritten, updated, hacked, etc. There should be a possibility to preserve online news content and help anyone verify the time at which the online information existed in a certain state. This helps users find out if the information has been tampered with at a later point in time. Since trends are changing towards online news sources, we aim to specifically take ‘online news content’ into account, such as online journals, magazines, tabloids, legal documents, Wikipedia, etc.
The secure verification of the time at which online news content was generated and later modified is crucial for preserving the authenticity of news records. Offline digital information can be easily time-stamped using different systems online (see page 21 for an overview of existing systems). Using these systems, users can easily time-stamp any digital file that they can access online, or that they own, such as videos, pictures or text files. It is also possible to verify the time-stamps later to prove the presence of the file at the aforementioned time in the past. There is also available downloadable software for such purposes; chapter 2 describes these in detail. However, there is no system available on the Internet that allows its users to specify the online news media they would like to securely time-stamp or preserve and subsequently keep track of their changes. The news production sources are not interested in creating different versions of news articles and often they update news pages without providing this information to their readers.
An example of covert news article modification is shown in the Figure 1-1. Thus, there is a dire need for a system that can keep track of time-stamped news content and monitor it for changes. Therefore, we require a platform that will provide an interface, which allows for tamperproof time-stamping of user-selected online news coverage. There exists sophisticated research in the domain of trusted time-stamping and the details of this research are described in chapter 2. There is a need to find a secure and tamper-proof way to achieve trusted time-stamping services for online digital content. Moreover, it is necessary to implement a trusted method in developing a tamper proof time-stamping system. Thus
This content is AI-processed based on open access ArXiv data.
