Design of an Enhanced Web Archiving System for Preserving Content Integrity with Blockchain

A Web archive system is a traditional subject for preserving web content for the future and the importance is getting more significant due to the explosive growth of web content. The reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS) has been advising guidance for a long-term archiving system and most organizations that archive web content follow this guidance. In addition, the web archive (WARC) ISO standard is for web content archiving. However, there is no way to secure content integrity, and it is hard to identify the original. Because of limitations, a web archive system has a weakness against the dispute of content integrity. In this paper, we proposed the blockchain linked (BCLinked) web archiving system, which uses blockchain technology and an extended WARC field to keep a web content integrity metadata into a blockchain. Furthermore, we designed the BCLinked web archiving system, and we confirmed the proposed system secures content integrity through the experiment.