Distributed Ledger Document Edit Traceability
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Solution Overview
Problem
Advanced technologies for editing digital assets, such as images and audio recordings, make it difficult to detect alterations, leading to concerns about body dysmorphic disorders, deceptive advertising, and fraud, as conventional methods lack confidence in verifying the provenance and edit history of digital documents.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a system that uses a distributed ledger, like a blockchain, to track and audit edits and alterations of digital documents by generating cryptographic fingerprints and edit histories, ensuring immutability and decentralization, allowing for real-time tracking and verification of document changes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If conventional image editing applications are used to alter digital images, then the visual appearance can be modified, but the ability to detect alterations is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by embedding a fingerprint (cryptographic hash) of the original document state into the document metadata before any edits are made. This preliminary fingerprint serves as a reference point that enables later detection of alterations, resolving the contradiction by preparing detection capability in advance rather than attempting to detect changes after they occur.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary mechanism - a distributed ledger (blockchain) - that stores and verifies document fingerprints independently of the editing process. This intermediary provides an immutable reference that mediates between the editing application and the detection process, allowing edits to proceed freely while maintaining an independent verification system that can detect alterations.
2Reliability
If distributed ledger technology is implemented to track document edits, then traceability and verification capability are improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts the verification function from the main document editing workflow by storing only cryptographic fingerprints (hashes) in the distributed ledger rather than storing complete document copies or detailed edit histories. This extraction reduces system complexity while maintaining reliability, as the ledger only needs to store and verify compact fingerprint data rather than managing complex document state information.
3Measurement precision
If cryptographic fingerprints are generated and stored for every document state, then edit detection capability is improved, but data storage requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses cryptographic hash functions to generate fingerprints that are computationally inexpensive and storage-efficient. Each fingerprint is a fixed-size cryptographic value (e.g., 256 bits) that serves its purpose of detecting alterations without requiring long-term retention of the actual document content. This approach provides high measurement precision for alteration detection while minimizing data storage requirements.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments provide traceability of edits to a document, i.e., a verifiable and immutable provenance chain for the document. Systems and methods enable traceability of edits, by encoding, for states of the document, a fingerprint (e.g., a cryptographic hash of the document's contents) and an edit history within a block written to a distributed ledger (e.g., a blockchain). The ledger is maintained via a self-organizing peer-to-peer distributed ledger network. Once added to the ledger, the contents of a block (e.g., the document's fingerprint and edit history) are immutable and the integrity of the edit history encoded in the ledger is secure. The algorithm that generates the fingerprint is sensitive to edits of the document. The non-corruptible fingerprint encoded in the ledger is employable to detect any edits that are not included in the encoded edit history and/or inconsistent with a currently available version of the document.