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

民主依赖于一个公平、透明和准确的制定和分配法律的体系。 不幸的是，网络攻击和恶意的内部人士有能力腐败、破坏或阻止人们接触法律，通过侵蚀对数字法律的系统可靠性的信任，威胁到民主本身的基础。 该项目的创新之处在于通过创建一个“数字法律的供应链”来开发保护法律的工具。 这些工具从法律和其他法律的信息被引入立法程序的那一刻起，通过在公共知识库中公布和分发，对法律和其他法律信息进行保护、验证和认证。 该项目更广泛的意义和重要性在于它改善了法律的安全性和可及性，对民主的未来和数字法律的系统的可信度也有相应的好处。该项目构建并部署了一个高效、可扩展和负责任的系统，以确保“数字法律的供应链”的每一步-立法、出版、存档和保存、认证以及法律访问。 这需要（1）安全和永久地分发、存档和访问可认证法律的长期解决方案;（2）将认证系统纳入立法程序，以提供可审计的保证，即通过的法律是那些当选官员打算通过的法律;（3）发布可认证的编辑文件的工具;以及（4）改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。 研究团队正在档案框架（TAF）中部署这些改进，这是一个用于近期出版和法律认证的框架，在美国五个司法管辖区的生产中使用，该奖项反映了NSF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进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.

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.