'We Have Always Been at War With Eastasia': Attacks Against Web Archives

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Presented at Elbsides 2026 by

Robin Kirchner

The Wayback Machine has just celebrated its 1 trillionth archived web page. Web archives have grown beyond their original purpose of simply preserving web content. They are now used by Supreme Court judges to preserve online evidence, by Wikipedia editors to maintain reliable sources, and by security researchers to study the evolution of JavaScript and tracking technologies. But can web archives live up to our expectations? In this talk, we challenge the assumption of *truthful preservation* by introducing five attacks within two new adversary models against web archives. We present the *evasive publisher* who can hide from web archives and selectively deceive them. But it gets worse... the *anachronistic publisher* can retroactively manipulate snapshots of their websites long after they have been archived. This talk will change the way you look at web archives, as we show that all eight of the popular web archives we studied were vulnerable to multiple of our attacks.