Collaborative Research: SaTC: TTP: Medium: Defending the Supply Chain of Democracy: Towards a Cryptographically Verified and Authenticated Network of Laws

Democracy depends on a fair, transparent, and accurate system for making and distributing laws. Unfortunately, cyberattacks and malicious insiders have the ability to corrupt, destroy, or withhold access to the law, threatening the foundations of democracy itself by eroding trust in the reliability of digital legal systems. The project’s novelties are the development of tools to secure the law by creating a “digital legal supply chain.” These tools protect, validate, and authenticate laws and other legal information from the moment they are introduced in the legislative process through their publication and distribution in public repositories. The project's broader significance and importance are its improvements to the security and accessibility of the law, with corresponding benefits for the future of democracy and the trustworthiness of digital legal systems. This project builds and deploys an efficient, scalable, and accountable system to secure every step of the “digital legal supply chain”—lawmaking, publishing, archiving and preservation, authentication, and access to the law. This entails (1) long-term solutions for distributing, archiving, and accessing authenticatable laws securely and in perpetuity; (2) systems for authentication integrated into the legislative process to provide auditable assurances that the laws as passed are those elected officials intended to pass; (3) tools for the release of authenticatable redacted documents; and (4) refining the user experience for these systems to make them suitable for adoption by governments of all sizes and institutional capacities. The team of researchers is deploying these improvements in The Archive Framework (TAF), a framework for near-term publication and authentication of the law, that is used in production in five U.S. jurisdictions, and in the process of adoption in two additional jurisdictions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.