snaproot: Decentralized File Integrity Verification Using Blockchain-Anchored Cryptographic Hashing

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 9 Jun 2026] snaproot: Decentralized File Integrity Verification Using Blockchain-Anchored Cryptographic Hashing Arslan Brömme, Tarkan Yavas The rapid growth of digital content has made reliable integrity verification increasingly important. Existing solutions rely either on centralized authorities, which introduce trust dependencies and single points of failure, or on decentralized storage systems that incur prohibitive resource overhead. In this paper, we present snaproot, a lightweight system that implements the hash-anchoring paradigm of Haber and Stornetta on the Solana blockchain to provide efficient, decentralized file integrity verification. snaproot generates a SHA-256 hash of a file and stores it immutably on-chain as a permanent reference record. Verification is performed by recomputing the hash and comparing it to the stored value, yielding a deterministic binary outcome. We describe a four-tier trust architecture comprising three realized tiers and one prospective tier for long-term persistence beyond the lifetime of any single blockchain. We present a formal threat model, a security analysis grounded in the second-preimage resistance of SHA-256, and an empirical evaluation on Solana Devnet across file sizes from 1 KB to 500 MB. A central conceptual contribution is the explicit separation between existence proof, the key-independent claim that a file existed at a given time, and authorship proof, the key-dependent binding between a record and a specific wallet identity. This separation allows existence guarantees to survive key loss while preserving stronger authorship claims where keys are retained. We position snaproot against OpenTimestamps, OriginStamp, and Chainpoint and discuss limitations with respect to pre-registration manipulation and AI-generated content. Comments: 38 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables. Working paper Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.10625 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.10625v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.10625 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Arslan Brömme [view email] [v1] Tue, 9 Jun 2026 09:25:49 UTC (53 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)