Weaponized Web Archives: Provenance Laundering of Short Order Evidence

ODU CS Colloquium, 2018-04-06, @phonedude_mln
Weaponized Web Archives:
Provenance Laundering of Short Order Evidence
Michael L. Nelson
Old Dominion University
Web Science & Digital Libraries Research Group
@WebSciDL, @phonedude_mln
With:
ODU: Michele C. Weigle, Mohamed Aturban, John Berlin, Sawood Alam, Plinio Vargas
Los Alamos National Laboratory: Herbert Van de Sompel, Martin Klein
Supported in part by The Andrew Mellon Foundation.
Opinions expressed are those of the presenter.
based on a 2018-03-23 presentation at the National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web

TL;DR
• We are on the cusp of a
“Photoshop” moment for
synthesizing convincing
audio/video
• Web archives will be
weaponized to:
– alter trustworthy content
– obfuscate provenance of
untrustworthy content
web archives
https://imgur.com/gallery/akeVeiq

background:
what’s a web archive?

ODU CS Colloquium, 2018-04-06, @phonedude_mlnhttp://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.odu.edu/
also: http://whatdiditlooklike.mementoweb.org/tagged/odu.edu

what was here?
we’ll likely never know…
(ok, xkcd gives us an idea…)

Sure, go ahead and archive
www.odu.edu -- but what about
archiving all your
Facebook posts,
tweets,instagrams,
check-ins, etc.?

“Why are they putting all that online?”
“And it’s easy to deride this sort of
thing as self-absorbed publishing –
why would anyone put such drivel
out in public?
It’s simple. They’re not talking to you.
We misread these seemingly inane
posts because we’re so unused to
seeing written material in public that
isn’t intended for us.”
Clay Shirky, 2008, p. 85

We have semi-private discussions in
public spaces all the time…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/us/politics/isnt-that-the-trump-lawyer-a-reporters-accidental-scoop.html
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/how-the-hum-of-a-coffee-shop-can-boost-creativity/
Even though we know others can eavesdrop – maybe we even want that –
if they whipped out their iPhone and started recording us, it might change our behavior.

as the web archiving community, we constantly are asking ourselves:
“Are we creating tools that aid the
surveillance state?”
Spoiler alert: Yes.

Our attitude about the
surveillance state is contextual.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/boston-marathon-bombing-iconic-images/
http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/04/20/boston-police-commissioner-edward-davis-says-
releasing-photos-was-turning-point-boston-marathon-bomb-probe/sojcZNcTCGah8UYBnRuk9O/story.html
Boston Marathon Bombing, 2013
https://twitter.com/charliespiering/status/976430395964215296

Given enough time, it becomes art
https://archive.org/details/prelingerhomemovies
https://genius.com/Dj-shadow-letter-from-home-lyrics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIR62rreRKY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKjg1HfZfPM#t=2m46s
https://www.sinecurebooks.com/shop/enjoy-the-experience-bundle/
personally
identifiable
information!

Meanwhile, we happily pay monthly
service fees to be surveilled!
https://www.citiusminds.com/blog/home-automation-with-smart-speakers-amazon-echo-vs-google-home-vs-apple-homepod/
https://twitter.com/mtdukes/status/974281625348558848

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
A: Social media.
https://twitter.com/WIRED/status/958350367468683267 https://twitter.com/vicenews/status/670059493581959168

We don’t feel too bad when we archive accounts that
later prove to be trolls / sockpuppets / sybils
https://twitter.com/safety_refinery/status/934982022078042112
https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2018/01/2018-01-02-link-to-web-archives-not.html
https://twitter.com/documentnow/status/964882665982722048
https://news.docnow.io/blacktivists-in-the-archive-71c807aa247e

Nor do we feel bad for holding
public figures / organizations accountable
https://twitter.com/landlibrarian/status/975910915135754240
https://twitter.com/IEEEhistory/status/960358528987942912
http://archive.is/xh58B

But our attitude is different when those
organizations explicitly monitor us
https://twitter.com/pierce/status/980860438119301120https://twitter.com/LSJNews/status/979017806116245504

We can & should discuss our role in surveillance,
but realize Facebook et al. operating as designed
(and before you say “I’m too cool for Facebook”, remember that Facebook owns Instagram)
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/975076957485457408https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/975013825010458624
see also: data as toxic waste http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

as the web archiving community, we should be asking ourselves:
“Can we authenticate web content?”
Spoiler alert: Yes. A bit.

Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987, p. 201

“We cannot accept this photograph in evidence”
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2018/mar/27/
blog-posting/david-hogg-not-school-during-shooting-s-fake-news/
https://twitter.com/acnwala/status/977982456296034304

Granted, we’ve had obvious, cut-n-paste /
mashup “evidence” for a long time…
Victorian Photo Collage
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2010/victorian-photocollage
“The Flying Saucer” (1956)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer_(song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCrn6QXvHLg
Brian Williams Raps ‘Gin & Juice’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlGLhYFrv6w

Crude techniques = humor,
sophisticated techniques = deception;
Brand’s prediction of “any day now” is now
Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio
SIGGRAPH 2017
https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/AudioToObama/
Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment
of RGB Videos, CVPR 2016
http://niessnerlab.org/projects/thies2016face.html
see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkkph4JhrCg

What does this have to do with the web?
Clumsy, “collage/flying saucer/gin & juice” techniques
are already effective on social media
We are completely unprepared for
advanced, SIGGRAPH/CVPR techniques

Neo-Nazis and “Black Panther”
Relationship Status: It’s Complicated
http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1338390-black-panther
https://twitter.com/TamikaDMallory/status/964701120194019328

nydailynews.com provides screenshots,
but not links to the tweets…
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/trolls-lying-assaults-black-panther-showings-article-1.3824901

@AsianWifeHaver and @DSA_Boi_Pucci
are not on the live web…
$ curl -I https://twitter.com/AsianWifeHaver
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate,
pre-check=0, post-check=0
content-length: 103
content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8
date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:09:27 GMT
expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
last-modified: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:09:27 GMT
location: https://twitter.com/account/suspended
$ curl -I https://twitter.com/AsianWifeHaver
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
content-length: 103
date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:09:27 GMT
location: https://twitter.com/account/suspended
$ curl -I https://twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
content-length: 6329
content-security-policy: [deletia]
date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 22:14:22 GMT

…nor are they in the Internet Archive
note: this exists only
because of the redirection
to the “suspended” page
http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://twitter.com/AsianWifeHaver
http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci

Can’t find @DSA_Boi_Pucci in any archive
Typical archive URI construction:
archive.example.org/SomeString/CNN.com/travel
web.archive.org/web/*/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
wayback.archive-it.org/all/*/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
perma-archives.org/warc/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
archive.is/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
wayback.vefsafn.is/wayback/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
arquivo.pt/wayback/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
for a full list of public web archives, see: http://labs.mementoweb.org/aggregator_config/archivelist.xml

What if we checked these archives?
What if they all agreed?
breitbart.com/wayback/*/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
infowars.com/web/*/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
iluv.aynrand.org/*/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
InternetResearchAgency.ru/twitter.com/DSA_Boi_Pucci
Would you trust the results?

Our entire national digital preservation
strategy is predicated on
Brewster Kahle (IA) “not being evil”™
If he is leading a 20+ year sleeper cell, we’re doomed.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17)
http://web.archive.org/web/20140717152222/http://vk.com/strelkov_info
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0717/Web-evidence-points-to-pro-Russia-rebels-in-downing-of-MH17-video
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb

(not really archived as well as we’d like)

Ed and I Discuss Who Has What…
https://twitter.com/phonedude_mln/status/490171976389238784

Remember MH17?
https://twitter.com/phonedude_mln/status/490171976389238784

Alex is now 404.
Would multiple archives have convinced him?
https://twitter.com/quicknquiet

Do we really have
“a perfect tool to produce `evidence’ of any kind”?

Segal’s Law, restated for web archives:
The person with an archive knows what the page looked like.
The person with two archives is never sure.

(apologies to Notorious B.I.G.)
“Mo Archives, Mo Problems”
Why? Because they’ll rarely agree.
Even a single archive is an unreliable witness:
zombies, temporal violations, and attacks

Zombies: live web “leaking” into an archived page
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2012/10/2012-10-10-zombies-in-archives.html
this page is
from 2008
this ad is
from 2012
(when this
screen shot
was taken)

Temporal violations: reconstructing legitimately
archived resources into a page that never existed
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2015/12/2015-12-08-evaluating-temporal.html
text (2004-12)
says rain,
image (2005-09)
is clear

Directly attacking the archive
(in this case, via orphaned live web resources; “zombie attack”)
Lerner, Kohno, Roesner, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1145/3133956.3134042
see also: Cushman & Kreymer http://labs.rhizome.org/presentations/security.html
page is from 2011,
iframe content is from 2017
(when screenshot was taken)

Based on feedback from Lerner et al.,
IA has changed their playback
(specifically, with a Content-Security-Policy HTTP response header)
But playback remains problematic…
(apologies to Peter Arnett)
“In order to save the page, we had to completely change it”
let’s look at four common scenarios

1) JavaScript does not run correctly from the archive
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2017/01/2017-01-20-cnncom-has-been-unarchivable.html
This is cnn.com not replaying;
it hasn’t replayed correctly since
November 1, 2016

2) Archived page renders differently each time
Mohamed Aturban, unpublished, memento:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130724144801/http://www.cnn.com/

3) Archive modifies pages that should stay the same –
goodbye conventional fixity checks!
Mohamed Aturban, unpublished, embedding memento:
http://perma-archives.org/warc/20170101182813/http://umich.edu/
http://perma-archives.org/warc/20170101182814id_/http://umich.edu/includes/image/type/gallery/id/113/name/ResearchDIL-19Aug14_DM%28136%29.jpg/width/152/height/152/mode/minfit/

4) Archived page doesn’t match live web experience
https://web.archive.org/web/20180302184025/https:/twitter.com/Emma4Change
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2018/03/2018-03-21-cookies-are-why-your.html
“only a ‘crisis actor’ would
tweet in Slovak!”
Now imagine she gets fed up,
deletes her account, and then
someone applies the
“abandoned acct / archive” attack
Justin Littman described:
https://gwu-libraries.github.io/sfm-ui/posts/2017-11-06-vulnerabilities

How can we differentiate between “normal”
archive modification for playback vs. deception?
These might have been swapped -- but how can you tell for sure?
If the tweets or accts are deleted, we don’t know.
If I embed fake tweets in another page, it’s even more confusing.
And it is not in Twitter’s (perceived) self-interest to help, cf.:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/03/why-twitter-wont-remove-trumps-nuclear-war-tweet/

You cannot trust the URL in your browser!
Here’s an actual page in the IA “proving”
Brian Williams released “Gin and Juice” in 1992, a full year before Snoop Dogg.
John Berlin, MS Thesis, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QTcJZdFfs
(actual URI-R & URI-M have also been faked in video)
The content is clearly fake, but imagine replacing:
1)“1992” with a more believable “2016”,
2)the fake domain with “bbc.com”, and
3)Brian Williams rapping with a synthesized Trump or Obama speech.

Blockchain to the rescue!!!
<lasers>
<sirens>
<disco-thumping-soundtrack>
nope.
https://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/avoiding-pointless-blockchain-project/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf

Instead, let’s use web archives
to monitor web archives.

Step 1: Push to multiple archives
web.archive.org/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
wayback.archive-it.org/all/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
arquivo.pt/wayback/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
archive.is/20180321/eaw.rhizome.orgeaw.rhizome.org

Step 2: Compute fixity,
publish fixity “manifest” at a well-known location
manifest.org/20180322/web.archive.org/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
manifest.org/20180322/wayback.archive-it.org/all/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
manifest.org/20180322/arquivo.pt/wayback/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
manifest.org/20180322/archive.is/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
It’s understood that archived HTML is continuously rewritten, so only compute fixity on things that
should not change, like JPEGs and certain original HTTP response headers.
This example assumes the existence of a well-known server manifest.org.
Actual URIs can be a bit more complex using “Trusty URIs”:
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2017/01/2017-01-15-summary-of-trusty-uris.html

Wondering about veracity of an archived page?
Check manifest.org and recompute fixity.
manifest.org/20180322/web.archive.org/
web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.orgweb.archive.org/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
what if manifest.org is down?
or possibly hacked?
We can’t know archive.org did not alter contents on ingest (20180321),
but we can verify that it has not changed since our observation (20180322)

Step 4: Push manifest to multiple archives
web.archive.org/web/20180323/manifest.org/20180322/web.archi
ve.org/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
wayback.archive-it.org/all/20180323/manifest.org/20180322/
arquivo.pt/wayback/20180323/eaw.rhizome.org/manifest.org/20180322/
archive.is/20180323/eaw.rhizome.org/manifest.org/20180322/
manifest.org/20180322/
web.archive.org/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome
.org
Now the 20180322 version of the manifest of archive.org’s
memento of rhizome.org is in four different archives.
The URIs are ugly, but the bottom line is an attacker would have to hack a
majority of 5 domains (manifest.org + 4 archives)
Can repeat for manifests of mementos of rhizome.org in archive-it.org, arquivo.pt, archive.is, etc.

Wondering about veracity of an archived page?
Check all copies of manifest.org and take a majority
vote
manifest.org/20180322/web.archive.org/
web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
Caveat 1: If I can hack rhizome.org page at archive.org, I can probably hack the
fixity info there too, so we really have 4 copies not 5.
web.archive.org/web/20180323/manifest.org/20180322/web.arch
ive.org/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
wayback.archive-it.org/all/20180323/manifest.org/20180322/
arquivo.pt/wayback/20180323/eaw.rhizome.org/manifest.org/20180322/
archive.is/20180323/eaw.rhizome.org/manifest.org/20180322/
Caveat 2: archive.org and archive-it.org are not independent,
so we really have 3 copies not 5. (yes, this is very similar to textual criticism)

No fixity information?
Maybe it’s ok, maybe it’s not.
infowars.com/web/20180321/eaw.rhizome.org
404
404
404
404
404
or perhaps fixity was computed and stored at freedomfries.org;
you have to decide if you trust that site.
see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY15lj-7_lc
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2017/12/2017-12-11-difficulties-in-timestamping.html

Conclusions
• Bad news:
– The web will be the primary vector for increasingly
sophisticated disinformation
– Web archives can be used to forge or obscure the
provenance of this information
– Brian Williams predates Snoop Dogg
• Good news:
– Web archives have a role in authenticating who said what,
and when
– Contact Dr. Weigle and me if you are interested in privacy,
authenticity, social media, web archiving, etc.

Weaponized Web Archives: Provenance Laundering of Short Order Evidence

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