Case study

The Starling Lab

Starling Lab demonstrates how decentralized technologies can establish trust in the digital age, applying cryptographic integrity and Web3 standards to protect journalism, history, and human-rights data worldwide.

  • Challenge

    Data integrity in the digital age is undermined by manipulation, misattribution, and centralized control, making it difficult to verify when, where, and by whom content was created—eroding public trust in media and historical records.

  • Solution

    The Starling Framework for Data Integrity uses cryptography, blockchain, and decentralized storage to create an end-to-end trust pipeline—Capture, Store, Verify—that keeps digital information provable, traceable, and tamper-resistant.

  • Results

    Starling Lab is proving the real-world impact of decentralized technology to restore digital trust, with its framework now adopted by major media outlets, universities, and nonprofits to preserve authentic records and safeguard truth for future generations.

Overview

The Starling Lab—co-founded by the USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University's Department of Electrical Engineering, with support from Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web—was created to establish trust in digital records of human history. Using decentralized storage, cryptography, and open-source verification tools, Starling Lab helps journalists, researchers, and human rights defenders preserve data authenticity and provenance in an age of misinformation

Challenge

  • The internet and associated technologies have dramatically changed how we record experiences, publish content and govern truth. FFDW notes that while digital connectivity empowers people globally, it also makes it easier for mis‐/disinformation, manipulation, and deepfakes to proliferate.
  • Digital content is highly vulnerable: original capture metadata may be lost, attribution unclear, links or hosting may vanish ("link rot"), and centralized platforms can become single points of failure. Starling Lab emphasises that the "root of trust" must be captured as close to source as possible.
  • Institutions working in journalism, history, human rights, and legal evidence struggle to reliably prove provenance, authenticity and integrity of digital assets—especially under conditions of risk, conflict, or political suppression.

Solution

Starling Lab’s solution is articulated through a three-phase framework: Capture → Store → Verify, combined with a broader design principle of "Authenticity-by-Design". From the FFDW blog:

  • Capture: At the moment of creation or ingestion of digital content—photos, video, audio, websites—metadata is collected: timestamps, GPS coordinates, device metadata. Creators are empowered to control what provenance data is released (respecting privacy). Example: Project "Dokaz" in Ukraine captured data for legal submission with chain-of-custody metadata.
  • Store: Once captured, assets (and their metadata) are stored on decentralized, content-addressed networks (e.g., IPFS, the Filecoin network, etc.). Starling Lab uses its "Integrity Pipeline": encryption, attestations (authsign certificates), automated metadata processing, and anchoring to distributed storage for redundancy & long-term availability.
  • Verify: The provenance and authenticity of assets are made auditable via human and machine workflows: expert attestations, registration of content IDs on blockchains, consumption tools that allow users to inspect trust signals. Audiences can evaluate trustworthiness of digital content themselves.

Additionally, Starling Lab embraces an "Authentcity by Design" philosophy: embedding verifiable markers of provenance, ensuring persistence (via decentralised systems), verifiability, accountability, and respecting privacy from the start.

Results

The Starling Framework has been successfully deployed in multiple high-impact contexts:

  • Uploading and preserving over 56,000 testimonies from genocide survivors (via USC Shoah Foundation) to IPFS & Filecoin, including capture of new interviews with trusted provenance metadata.
  • Submissions to the International Criminal Court (ICC) via Project Dokaz in Ukraine: establishing methodology for war-crimes evidence capture and preservation. Support for a Reuters project documenting the 2020 U.S. presidential transition (the "78 Days" project), using image-authentication workflows and decentralized storage.
  • Demonstrable deployment of the framework across journalism, legal and historical fields, thereby showing real-world proof of how decentralised web technologies can support social-impact missions.