As online sources are becoming more prevalent in journalism and scientific literature, the ephemeral nature of the World Wide Web is becoming an increasingly serious issue for their verifiability, replicability, and reproducibility. The architecture of Webchain, a new system enabling source and reference verifiability on the Web, is combining distributed ledger technologies with secure timestamping to ensure the history of creation, ownership, and referential integrity of online resources. We present the architecture and system extensions, conduct a security analysis, and evaluate the Webchain system based on a comprehensive prototype implementation. The results confirm the feasibility and robustness of our approach.

中文翻译：

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使用 Webchain 为万维网启用参考可验证性

随着在线资源在新闻和科学文献中变得越来越普遍，万维网的短暂性因其可验证性、可复制性和可再现性而变得越来越严重。Webchain 是一个在 Web 上实现源和参考可验证性的新系统，其架构将分布式账本技术与安全时间戳相结合，以确保在线资源的创建历史、所有权和参考完整性。我们展示了架构和系统扩展，进行了安全分析，并基于全面的原型实现评估了 Webchain 系统。结果证实了我们方法的可行性和稳健性。