The aim of ARCHANGEL is to ensure the long-term sustainability of digital archives though the design, development and trialling of transformational new distributed ledger technology (DLT) to promote accessibility and ensure integrity of content, whilst maximising its impact through novel business models for commodification and open access. Archives and Memory Institutions (AMIs) are the lens through which future generations will perceive today; they form the authoritative economic, social and cultural memory of a nation. For example, The National Archives (>15 petabytes) is one of the world's largest and oldest AMIs responsible for preserving the digital record of the UK Government e.g. key decisions made by Ministers and advice received. Some of this information is made open, some kept closed for decades. AMIs are founded upon the principle of public trust, of being neutral and completely trustworthy; the immutability and integrity of AMIs are essential to maintaining their objectivity. Yet world history is littered with examples where this objectivity has been compromised e.g. through expunging of physical records during times of political unrest. Today's digital age presents new socio-technical challenges to AMIs around safeguarding of data. Digital public records are intangible and so easy to remove or modify without that modification necessarily being detectable. Indeed in some cases records have to be modified to ensure their continued accessibility as formats change and the curation of data is also accompanied by the need to maintain associated code to render that data for presentation, often across decades. How should decisions over migration or prioritisation of maintenance be taken, or audited? What are the implications of migrations resulting in minor losses of fidelity one hundred years from now? How can the public be sure that digital content when released is fundamentally unaltered from the original? Existing archival practice is ill-equipped to respond to such issues, and is in urgent need of disruption to keep pace with our transformation into an increasingly digital society, so ensuring the integrity and impartiality of knowledge for future generations. ARCHANGEL is a 18 month socio-technical feasibility study co-creating and evaluating a novel prototype DLT service with end-users to determine how archival practices, sustainable models and public attitudes could evolve in the presence of a trusted decentralised technology to prove content integrity and ensure open access to digital public archives. From a technological standpoint, ARCHANGEL will leverage cutting-edge machine learning to collect robust digital signatures derived from digitised physical, and born-digital content, within a permissioned DLT. Both signatures and programmatic code to render content and verify its provenance and integrity will be encoded within the DLT. Novel business models for sustaining the DLT e.g. via contributed effort (proof of work) will be explored at the points of creation and consumption using a cross-AMI model in which a single DLT is contributed to by multiple AMIs, across disciplines and nations, mitigating risk of archive distortion by its operating AMI. Impact is not limited to traditional AMIs, but any digital public archive: University research data repositories (linked to DOI); better management of corporate memory in multi-nationals (e.g. financial/regulatory compliance, managing records of prior art in tech companies). To undertake this adventurous and ambitious project we have formed a strategic multi-disciplinary partnership uniting a world-leading group in multi-modal signal processing (CVSSP), the Centre for the Digital Economy (CODE) within Surrey Business School, and a consortium of AMI stakeholders including The National Archives and Tim Berners-Lee's Open Data Institute (ODI). The infrastructure will be developed with DLT platform provider Guardtime, and impact accelerated via Methods Digital.

Personal data holds great potential to benefit commerce and society, but, at the institutional level, concerns are rising over the risks associated with data access, ownership, privacy and confidentiality. The main purpose of this project is to investigate whether and how these institutional concerns are reflected in the perceptions of individual users. This proposal will establish a new programme of research in digital economy by understanding how individual subjective perceptions of users with regard to cybersecurity relate to organizational and institutional views on cybersecurity. By gaining this understanding we seek to develop new business models which would allow businesses to minimize individual perceptions of vulnerability with regard to issues of privacy, security, and trust. We propose that individual subjective vulnerability with regard to cybersecurity issues is an important factor which impact upon business models and the development of digital economy. We consider vulnerability from three perspectives: 1) An individual's perspective of their own vulnerability; 2) The perspective of the entity the individual is interacting with in the digital domain (which could be another individual, or a business); and 3) The institution that is tasked to regulate and protect all entities within the system (e.g., the state, regulatory body, etc.). All three entities are likely to assess individual vulnerabilities in different ways and would have a separate sets of trade-offs against the risks. An individual considers the trade-off between the choice/freedom to use a service against the risk of being vulnerable. A business, on the other hand, approximates individual's vulnerability and makes an assessment of risk which is important for its business model in order to trade off revenues and provide additional service to mitigate that risk to the extent that it would pacify the user and the regulator. Finally, from a state point of view, the aggregation of a large numbers of users creates a complex system of data sharing which bears a systemic risk that may result in individual vulnerabilities which are hard to quantify and manage. Proposed project will implement "in-the-wild" strategy in order to: (i) Measure individual vulnerability with regard to cybersecurity issues using different contexts and taking into account individual heterogeneity; (ii) Using these context-dependent measure, propose new business models which would mitigate perceptions of cybersecurity risks; (iii) Suggest tools for policy makers and regulators to decrease cybersecurity risks via bridging the gap between subjective vulnerability of users and objective vulnerability measured by businesses and other institutions.