Developing a system for securely time-stamping and visualizing the changes made to online news content

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized system that securely time-stamps online news articles using blockchain technology, enabling verification of authenticity and preventing manipulation of archived digital news content.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that leverages blockchain for trusted timestamping of online news, addressing manipulation and authenticity verification issues.

Findings

Successfully implemented blockchain-based timestamping for news articles

Enables verification of article authenticity through multiple online versions

Prevents manipulation of archived online news content

Abstract

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.