Design of Chained Document HTML Generation Technique Based on Blockchain for Trusted Document Communication

Abstract

Digital document communication between an enterprise and a customer is becoming a primary form of communication rather than the traditional physical document communication. A PDF document, the most popular document format, provides an identical document layout regardless of OS or device and has a content integrity verification feature with a digital signature. However, it has a bad user experience, such as low readability on a mobile device. On the other hand, an HTML document has a weakness in verifying the content integrity even though it is the primary document format and provides a good user experience on mobile devices. There are certified document services using blockchain technology, but it is still vulnerable to verifying content integrity. Furthermore, research on the document HTML has proposed the trusted document generation technique by HTML conformance and digital signature; however, this research does not provide content delivery verification, and there is a file size overhead. In this paper, we have developed the chained document HTML by defining HTML conformance, digital signature, and blockchain technology. First, the chained document HTML has to embed all resources and does not allow loading content on-demand. Second, the file is signed by a digital signature, and the signature value is added in the file header. Lastly, the metadata to verify the content integrity is inserted in a blockchain node. We have created the chained document HTML generation and verification experiment environment by Ethereum and Python. We have confirmed that the chained document HTML provides content and delivery integrity verification in the research. We expect the chained document HTML will be widely used in document communication between an enterprise and a customer, especially if the document has sensitive personal information that might have a legal dispute.