The internet is flooded with content. Every day, billions of images, videos, articles, datasets, and AI outputs circulate across platforms. Audiences, publishers, and platforms face a fundamental challenge: who created this, under what conditions, and can it be trusted?
Currently, answers are unreliable. Watermarks can be stripped. Metadata can be altered. Even advanced AI detection tools provide only probabilistic signals. Publishers and audiences need verifiable trust, not best-effort guesses.
Digital integrity provides a solution. It enables content to carry cryptographically verifiable proof of origin and creation process, along with endorsements that travel with the artifact. Signed and attested artifacts can be validated by anyone, creating a portable standard of trust that is both machine-readable and actionable.
Foundations: Signatures and Identity
Digital integrity begins with cryptography. Digital signatures provide a mathematical proof that binds an artifact to its creator. Altering the content breaks the signature. Anyone with the corresponding public key can independently validate it.
A signed artifact becomes a digital object with verifiable authenticity. Whether it is a dataset, a model, an article, or a video, authenticity establishes a binding between the content and its creator. Copies may exist, but only the signed original carries cryptographic proof of origin.
Capturing Process with Attestations
Artifacts typically pass through multiple systems, workflows, or intermediaries. Understanding these steps is essential for evaluating trust. Attestations provide cryptographically signed statements describing how an artifact was produced.
- A software build pipeline can attest that a binary was compiled from a specific source commit.
- A data preparation workflow can attest that the dataset meets specified quality or privacy standards.
- A media workflow can attest to editing steps or AI augmentations applied to a video.
These attestations travel with the artifact, documenting creation processes in a verifiable way. Together with signatures, attestations provide a complete view of both origin and process.
Building Trust Ecosystems
Digital integrity extends beyond individual artifacts. Publishers, journalists, and content platforms operate within networks of trust, where credibility depends on relationships: which organizations or editors endorse content, which fact-checkers validate it, and which intermediaries are involved.
Our approach introduces trust manifests (trust.txt or trust.json) as simple, machine-readable tools for organizing these networks. Trust manifests declare:
- Which authors or organizations are recognized as credible
- Which intermediaries or services are authorized to attest to content
- How trust signals propagate across linked artifacts and platforms
Trust manifests enable transitive and portable trust. When a journalist publishes an article, downstream platforms and applications can automatically verify endorsements and process attestations, extending credibility beyond a single site.
Crucially, this system supports user-driven trust. Applications and infrastructure can serve content according to each user’s trust preferences, rather than hoarding trust decisions in opaque, centrally controlled roots. This flexibility creates dynamic ecosystems where trust is explicit, verifiable, and composable.
Policy-Driven Automation
Digital integrity is actionable through policy engines such as OPA or Cedar. Machine-readable proofs allow organizations and systems to automatically enforce rules:
- Accept only artifacts signed by trusted creators
- Reject outputs that lack required process attestations
- Flag artifacts with incomplete provenance
Policies operate across artifacts, workflows, and agents. AI systems and applications can make real-time trust decisions, scaling integrity enforcement far beyond human capacity.
Economic Implications
Trust underpins the value of publishing. Audiences pay for credible reporting. Advertisers pay for brand-safe placements. Regulators enforce standards.
Emerging threats—from AI-generated deepfakes to manipulated datasets—erode trust and diminish value. Content without verifiable origin and process loses credibility. Content with cryptographically verifiable authenticity commands trust, wider distribution, and economic value.
Digital integrity transforms authenticity into scarce, portable, and measurable value. Verified artifacts become assets recognized by systems, platforms, and users alike. Scarcity drives economic significance, and verifiable trust signals become a form of currency in digital publishing ecosystems.
What’s the Catalyst?
The trajectory mirrors software supply chain security after SolarWinds. A systemic failure or crisis will accelerate adoption, making digital integrity a table-stakes requirement for publishing.
The total addressable market spans multiple industries:
- News media demand verifiable credibility
- Academic publishing requires transparent provenance
- Entertainment and advertising require content authenticity for brand safety
- AI ecosystems require traceable datasets, prompts, and outputs to avoid liability
Digital integrity is horizontal infrastructure: once established, all digital artifacts can carry it. Adoption scales across platforms, industries, and geographies, creating a durable market.
The Role of Digital Integrity for the Archive
History is written by those who control the records. In the digital age, where content can be altered, deleted, or fabricated with increasing sophistication, the ability to rewrite history has never been easier. Digital integrity offers a critical safeguard: immutable proof of what existed, when it existed, and who created it.
An archive with digital integrity functions like a Svalbard seed bank for human knowledge and culture. Just as the Arctic vault preserves genetic diversity against catastrophe, a cryptographically secured archive preserves the authentic record against manipulation. Every artifact—news articles, government documents, scientific papers, cultural works—carries its own unalterable proof of origin and timestamp.
Beyond preventing malicious revision, digital integrity creates a foundation of shared truth that future generations can rely on. When every piece of archived content is cryptographically signed and timestamped, attempts to alter the historical record become immediately detectable. The archive becomes a bedrock of verifiable fact in an era of fluid digital reality.
For publishers, this represents both a responsibility and an opportunity. Content created with digital integrity today becomes tomorrow’s unimpeachable historical record. The archive transforms from a passive repository into an active guardian of truth, where authenticity is preserved not through physical isolation but through mathematical certainty.
Authenticity as Currency
Content that carries verified origin, process attestations, and endorsements commands trust, reach, and economic value. Content that lacks these proofs loses influence.
Digital integrity converts authenticity into currency: a measurable, scarce property that moves with the artifact, recognized and enforceable by systems and users.
The question is not whether digital integrity will become essential—it is when. Once fully implemented, it will reshape publishing, AI ecosystems, and the broader digital economy.