Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Memento Protocol provides a Memento-Datetime header indicating at what datetime a memento was captured by a given web archive. In most cases, this metadata sufficiently informs the user of when the given web resource existed. Even though it has been established in US courts that web archives can be used to legally establish that a given web resource existed at a given time , there is still potential to doubt this timestamp because the same web archive that provides the memento also provides its Memento-Datetime . Though not a replacement for Memento-Datetime,  trusted timestamping is the process that provides certainty of timestamps for content and can be used to provide additional data to alleviate this doubt. In this post, I examine different trusted timestamping methods. I start with some of the more traditional methods before discussing  OriginStamp , a solution by Gipp, Meuschke, and Gernandt that uses the Bitcoin blockchain for timestamping. Brief Crypto...