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

Nowadays, the Internet is indispensable when it comes to informationdissemination. People rely on the Internet to inform themselves on current newsevents, as well as to verify facts. We, as a community, are quickly approachingan 'electronic information age' where the majority of information will bedistributed electronically and tools to preserve this information will becomeessential. While archiving online digital information is a good way to preserveonline information for future generations, it has many disadvantages includingthe 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 securelytime-stamped with the date and time when it was first archived in a way thatcannot be manipulated. The process of 'trusted timestamping' is an establishedapproach for claiming that particular digital information existed at aparticular 'point in time' in the past. However, traditional approaches fortrusted timestamping depend on the time-stamping authority's fidelity. Directlyembedding the hash of a digital file into the blockchain of a cryptocurrency isa more recent method that allows for secure time-stamping, since digitalinformation 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 forarchiving and time-stamping online news articles. Therefore, the aim of thisthesis is to develop a system that 1) enables decentralized trustedtime-stamping of web and news articles as a means of making future manipulationof online information identifiable, and 2) allows users to determine theauthenticity of articles by checking different versions of the same articleonline.