Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

It Is Hard To Compute Fixity On Archived Web Pages, Mohamed Aturban, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Checking fixity in web archives is performed to ensure archived resources, or mementos (denoted by URI-M) have remained unaltered since when they were captured. The final report of the PREMIS Working Group [2] defines information used for fixity as "information used to verify whether an object has been altered in an undocumented or unauthorized way." The common technique for checking fixity is to generate a current hash value (i.e., a message digest or a checksum) for a file using a cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256) and compare it to the hash value generated originally. If they have different hash …