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

民主有赖于制定和分发法律的公平、透明和准确的制度。不幸的是，网络攻击和恶意内部人士有能力腐败、破坏或阻止对法律的访问，通过侵蚀对数字法律系统可靠性的信任，威胁到民主本身的基础。该项目的创新之处在于开发工具，通过创建“数字法律供应链”来保障法律的安全。这些工具从法律和其他法律信息在立法过程中被引入的那一刻起就通过在公共存储库中发布和分发来保护、验证和认证它们。该项目更广泛的意义和重要性在于它改善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性带来了相应的好处。该项目构建和部署了一个高效、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、身份验证和获取法律。这需要(1)安全和永久地分发、存档和获取可认证法律的长期解决方案；(2)纳入立法进程的认证系统，以提供可审计的保证，即所通过的法律是打算通过的民选官员；(3)发布可认证的编辑文件的工具；以及(4)改进这些系统的用户体验，使其适合于各种规模和机构能力的政府采用。研究团队正在将这些改进部署在档案框架(TAF)中，这是一个用于近期发布和验证法律的框架，在美国五个司法管辖区的生产中使用，并在另外两个司法管辖区的采用过程中使用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.