Diogenes Wanders the Superhighway: A Proposal for Authentication of Publicly Disseminated Documents on the Internet

On the national level, there are proposals to make the Internet the primary, and even the exclusive, means of disseminating certain government information. Concurrently, corporations and other private organizations may adopt a similar approach for their reports and other documents. Intertwined with these official and quasi-official documents are innumerable others created by individuals around the world. With so many documents, there is potential for dissemination of false, biased, and even fraudulent information.

This is the source of the authentication problem.