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

民主有赖于一个公平、透明和准确的法律制定和分配制度。不幸的是，网络攻击和恶意的内部人士有能力腐败、破坏或阻止人们诉诸法律，通过侵蚀人们对数字法律体系可靠性的信任，威胁到民主的基础本身。该项目的新颖之处在于开发了通过创建“数字法律供应链”来保护法律的工具。这些工具通过在公共存储库中发布和分发法律和其他法律信息，从法律和其他法律信息被引入立法过程的那一刻起，对它们进行保护、验证和认证。该项目更广泛的意义和重要性在于它提高了法律的安全性和可及性，并为民主的未来和数字法律系统的可信度带来了相应的好处。该项目建立并部署了一个高效、可扩展和负责任的系统，以确保“数字法律供应链”的每一步——立法、出版、存档和保存、认证和获取法律。这需要(1)长期的解决方案，以安全、永久地分发、存档和访问可验证的法律；(2)纳入立法程序的认证制度，以提供可审计的保证，确保通过的法律是民选官员打算通过的法律；（三）发布可验证的编辑文件的工具；(4)完善这些系统的用户体验，使其适合各种规模和机构能力的政府采用。研究小组正在档案框架（TAF）中部署这些改进，这是一个用于近期发布和认证法律的框架，已在美国五个司法管辖区投入使用，并正在另外两个司法管辖区采用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.