A framework for the assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records over time

Digital documents are prone to be compromised, especially the archival records which are intended to be stored for a very long period (say 30+ years). Many modern security mechanisms, such as cryptography, are poorly suited to protect these archival records because it is often difficult to maintain decryption keys and update cryptographic systems over decades. An adversary that wants to tamper these archival records may only need to wait until the encryption algorithm used is compromised. In addition, the preservation of encrypted documents is not generally accepted in the international archival community. Thus, in this paper, we propose a framework for the assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records. The framework looks into evidence around digital records. On the assessment of the trustworthiness of a record, it structures the preserved evidence into an evidence tree and assigns evidential values to every pieces of evidence using experts’ knowledge or a reputation system. Finally, using the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory, the framework combines these evidential values from different evidence in the face of uncertainty, and arrive at the trustworthiness of digital records.