State laws do more than just delineate regulations for a specific geographic location. They also hold the history of the society that created those laws. As such there is a compelling reason to ensure that these documents are never tampered with, a scenario that has become increasingly possible as more jurisdictions adopt digital law platforms. 

The Archive Framework (TAF), a secure framework that leverages The Update Framework (TUF), a secure update system developed by CCS faculty member Professor Justin Cappos, has stepped in protect this increasingly vulnerable and critically important archival material. TAF was created in 2019 by the nonprofit Open Law Library, which worked in tandem with the Secure Systems Lab at NYU Tandon that Cappos leads. TAF leverages TUF’s security capabilities to protect Git repositories, and provide archival authentication. Primarily applied to the legal field, it aims to enable government institutions to secure their entire legal supply chain, and to meet the standards for authentication and preservation set forth in the Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act.

At the end of 2025, the state of Maryland became the first state to use TAF to publish its regulations online. The cryptographically secure technology can detect tampering, and preserve historical versions of legal documents. Cappos describes TAF as ” a high-security bank vault for legal documents,” while “traditional legal websites are like file cabinets, and anyone with the key can change what’s inside without leaving a trace.” TAF not only makes any attempts to change the law visible so that bad actions can be detected, but also stops malicious actors from changing the law in the first place. Cappos stresses that this latter feature matters because, “in a democracy, citizens need absolute confidence that the laws they are reading are authentic and haven’t been secretly altered by hackers or malicious insiders.”

You can read more about Maryland’s adoption of TAF here, and learn more about the development of the framework, to which Tandon Ph.D. candidate Patrick Zielinski also contributed, here.