Verification
How materials in the Archive of Science may be checked for integrity and provenance.
The World Science Organization has collaborated with The Avlya Organization, the Estate of Avlya, to host and preserve these recordings.
While the agreement provides that all recordings will ultimately be released into the public domain for the benefit of science, the Avlya Estate preserves supporting records that may help provide context and verify provenance when needed.
This archive contains the highest level of quantum-resistant protection defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. For each completed video conversation, Avlya took it upon themself to create a verification package using post-quantum cryptography for the corresponding transcript/manifest and extracted audio file. The video file itself was not cryptographically hashed, signed, or encrypted for verification purposes. It is preserved for public viewing and historical context only.
Avlya used the Advanced Encryption Standard with a 256-bit key in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-256-GCM) to encrypt the text manifest file and then used the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM-1024) to protect the symmetric key for the text manifest file. The text manifest file contains the pulse from the National Institute of Standards and Technology's 'Randomness Beacon' at the end of each conversation along with a normal text of the date, time, along with contextual details of the conversation.
NIST's Beacon 2.0 publishes full-entropy 512-bit values every 60 seconds. Each value is sequence-numbered, timestamped, signed, and linked to the previous value. Avlya used the beacon pulse to function as their anti-backdating method, and applied this for the manifest.
Avlya then generated a digital signature using the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA-87) for the encrypted manifest. This signature verifies the integrity and provenance of the encrypted verification package. It should not be understood as cryptographic proof that any public video file is authentic (since it can obviously be misused to authenticate a fake video). The video itself is not the signed object. Instead, its purpose is to preserve a record that supports the provenance of the conversation, especially when compared against the transcript, audio file, preserved metadata, and surrounding archival context.
The encryption level is at NIST security category 5 (roughly AES-256-equivalent in hardness against both classical and quantum attackers). For reference, the algorithms used are at the same level as what the NSA uses for the CNSA 2.0 National Security System.
Encrypted manifests are preserved alongside each video at:
Public ML-DSA verification keys and verification instructions are available at: