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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

Could SRI be used for this? [1]

[1] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

SRI/hashing works for static content. Though it's worth mentioning it's a SUB-resource feature (images, scripts, etc.). It doesn't work for hyperlinks to other pages. Even if it did, it's a different use case.

Say I link to an article by Author A that has comments in it (or even a footer, relative timestamp, sidebar, etc.). Hashing won't work as the page is always changing. I want the link to always go to Author A but I don't care if the content changes. That's the sort of use case signed webpages and hyperlinks with enforced authorship covers. It's less about what's on the page and more about who created it.

Good points. I would guess that for something to be implemented, it would have to be easy for browsers and API tools to check once per domain and cache the response and should probably be something that already exists and has been adopted. Maybe a page could have a meta tag or header that contains a hash of the destination sites DANE signature? Something like "targetref:somedomain.tld expectsig:39726a2fe2bb052cf00e6b95a8385f7" based on tools like danecheck [1] or maybe DNSSEC but that is very poorly adopted.

[1] - https://github.com/vdukhovni/danecheck

Finding a way to embed the domain registration date might be sufficient, that would cover most of the expiry situation

There was a ietf or similar registry that used your domain and registration date to carve out your namespace, ie dns.2021.07.26.com.example would be your prefix. Pretty robust. Can’t remember what it was anymore

The solution I was going for with WebVerify is more web-centric rather than domain-driven, which I think is a better fit for webpages. It can be enforced at the hyperlink-level for shared domains (like GitHub Pages, University web spaces) and works for static resources without needing to configure external resources. The only really complicated part is PGP but that can be solved with better tooling (as seen with Keybase).

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