Enabling Reference Verifiability for the World Wide Web with Webchain

Abstract

As online sources are becoming more prevalent in journalism and scientific literature, the ephemeral nature of the World Wide Web is becoming an increasingly serious issue for their verifiability, replicability, and reproducibility. The architecture of Webchain, a new system enabling source and reference verifiability on the Web, is combining distributed ledger technologies with secure timestamping to ensure the history of creation, ownership, and referential integrity of online resources. We present the architecture and system extensions, conduct a security analysis, and evaluate the Webchain system based on a comprehensive prototype implementation. The results confirm the feasibility and robustness of our approach.