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