Enhancing Legal Document Security and Accessibility with TAF
Renata Vaderna
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 2 · Privacy Systems
Renata Vaderna, former lead developer of TAF (The Archive Framework), presents a system for **long-term security and preservation of digital legal documents** that combines **Git** (version control) with **TUF** (The Update Framework) to create an authenticated, tamper-evident archive of the law. TAF is already deployed in **14 US jurisdictions** including the District of Columbia and the Council of Maryland, as well as tribal governments and the National Indian Law Library. The system addresses a critical gap: while paper law has millennia of mature preservation practices (seals, signatures, multiple copies in law libraries), digital law has only decades of experience and remains vulnerable to cyberattacks -- illustrated by three incidents in 2024-2025 including the erasure of a third of Russian court archives, a US federal court file system breach, and a UK government cover-up of a family court file loss due to an IT glitch.
AI review
A deployed system for cryptographically authenticating digital law using Git + TUF with threshold signing. Production use in 14 US jurisdictions is impressive real-world validation. However, this is applied systems engineering rather than security research -- no new cryptographic primitives, no novel attacks, no vulnerability discovery. The combination of Git and TUF is competent engineering but not technically deep.