Autonomous web archives: Static sites as durable infrastructure for organizations at risk
Project description:
Sutty CMS uses static sites generation and distributed-web publishing as durable and low-maintenance infrastructure for organizations and activists at risk.
Most attacks on activist and NGO’s websites comes from no budget for IT staff, no technical expertise or organizations too busy responding to more urgent needs to keep websites secure, updated, patched and maintained. When websites go unmaintained, they get defaced, infected or lost entirely. Which can mean losing an organization’s identity online and its connection to its community.
During the residency, I worked on formalizing something Sutty has done through practice for years. That is using static sites technologies and distributed-web publishing, like IPFS and Hypercore, as a security and preservation pattern for at-risk organizations. This included documenting real case studies from Sutty’s work, like covering Colectivo TLGB Bolivia website after it was defaced by attackers, and reflecting on what a threat-model framework for this context could look like.
The process was mostly conversational rather than a formal threat-modeling exercise. Talking with other residents, researchers and information security experts about assumptions we’d only tested through our own practice at Sutty.
This work confirmed that static, distributed-web published sites hold up as infrastructure for people and organizations in real danger, and makes the case for treating this as a recognized and adoptable pattern. It also surfaced a harder question, that is: what does it take for a small cooperative like Sutty to sustain this kind of work long-term.
Next steps include documenting more case studies and moving toward a more formal threat-model framework. Organizations and cooperatives interested in this approach are welcome to reach out to Sutty directly.
Artifacts:
Contributors:
Agus