Combating web plagiarism and improving internet safety by authenticating web content

Web content plays an important role in the contemporary information economy. Even though web content is used to generate advertising revenues for authors, and serves as an important reference and knowledge discovery resource for readers, proving original authorship and preventing plagiarism are not easy on the Internet. This paper presents the design and analysis of an automatic cryptography based solution for detecting and correcting web plagiarism. Unforgeable cryptographic commitments for originally authored content are stored in a distributed hash table over-layed on enhanced web browsers. Since it is based on content authentication, this solution not only protects against web plagiarism, but also improves web safety by preventing phishing attacks based on web page copying, poisoned DNS caches, or hacked web sites.