Difficulties of Timestamping Archived Web Pages

TL;DR

This paper examines the limitations of current blockchain timestamping services for web pages, highlighting issues with data referencing and hash reproducibility, and proposes requirements for consistent hashing of archived web content.

Contribution

It identifies key challenges in timestamping web pages and introduces necessary requirements for achieving repeatable cryptographic hashes of archived web content.

Findings

Current services accept data by value, not by reference

Generating consistent hashes for archived pages is difficult

Proposes requirements for repeatable hashing

Abstract

We show that state-of-the-art services for creating trusted timestamps in blockchain-based networks do not adequately allow for timestamping of web pages. They accept data by value (e.g., images and text), but not by reference (e.g., URIs of web pages). Also, we discuss difficulties in repeatedly generating the same cryptographic hash value of an archived web page. We then introduce several requirements to be fulfilled in order to produce repeatable hash values for archived web pages.