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.
@cite_1 discovered four vulnerabilities in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (i.e., Archive-Escapes, Same-Origin Escapes, Archive-Escapes + Same-Origin Escapes, and Anachronism-Injection) that attackers can leverage to modify a user's view at the time when a memento is rendered in a browser. The authors suggested some defenses that could be deployed by either web archives or web publishers to prevent abusing these vulnerabilities.
@cite_1
2753766236 1639723434 2949707104 1510484544
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the largest modern web archive, preserving web content since 1996. We discover and analyze several vulnerabilities in how the Wayback Machine archives data, and then leverage these vulnerabilities to create what are to our knowledge the first attacks against a user's view of the archived web. Our vulnerabilities are enabled by the unique interaction between the Wayback Machine's archives, other websites, and a user's browser, and attackers do not need to compromise the archives in order to compromise users' views of a stored page. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacks through proof-of-concept implementations. Then, we conduct a measurement study to quantify the prevalence of vulnerabilities in the archive. Finally, we explore defenses which might be deployed by archives, website publishers, and the users of archives, and present the prototype of a defense for clients of the Wayback Machine, ArchiveWatcher. This Note addresses the use of archived Internet content obtained via the Wayback Machine, a service provided by the Internet Archive that accesses the largest online digital collection of archived Web pages in the world. Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, Internet content is constantly changed, amended, and removed. As a result, interim versions of Web pages have limited life spans. The Internet Archive indexes and stores Web pages to allow researchers to access discarded or since-altered versions. In the legal profession, archived Web pages have become an increasingly helpful form of proof. Intellectual property enforcers have recognized the value of the Internet Archive as a tool for tracking down infringers, but evidence from the Internet Archive has rarely been admitted at trial. This Note surveys the handful of judicial opinions and orders that comment on the admission of Internet Archive evidence and explores the conflict underlying these approaches. As an alternative to the courses they have taken, this Note urges courts to treat the introduction of archived Web pages as implicating a best evidence issue in addition to an authentication question. Under this approach, courts would decide using evidence sufficient to the purpose, but not necessarily admissible at trial, whether the archived page qualifies as a 'duplicate' of a page that once appeared on the Web. Beyond that, courts would apply authentication standards already developed to decide whether a reasonable jury could find, based only on admissible evidence, whether proffered evidence accurately represents the page stored on the Internet Archive server and, if necessary, whether the original page accurately represented material placed on the originating site by the site’s owner or operator. With this additional step, reliable evidence from the Wayback Machine can become as easily admitted as any other Internet-derived proof. The Internet Archive's (IA) Wayback Machine is the largest and oldest public web archive and has become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Despite its importance, there has been little research about how it is discovered and used. Based on web access logs, we analyze what users are looking for, why they come to IA, where they come from, and how pages link to IA. We find that users request English pages the most, followed by the European languages. Most human users come to web archives because they do not find the requested pages on the live web. About 65 of the requested archived pages no longer exist on the live web. We find that more than 82 of human sessions connect to the Wayback Machine via referrals from other web sites, while only 15 of robots have referrers. Most of the links (86 ) from websites are to individual archived pages at specific points in time, and of those 83 no longer exist on the live web. The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocolwise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a signicant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.