Collected research

Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present

Ada Lerner, Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner · acmccs.github.io

Three flaws in the Wayback Machine let anyone rewrite the past. URL rewriting misses JavaScript-computed URLs, so snapshots fetch live subresources whose domain owner can serve any script; serving every archived origin from web.archive.org collapses the same-origin policy, letting an archived iframe rewrite its parent; and never-archived resources plus nearest-neighbour timestamp matching make an attacker's late upload the closest capture. 74% of top sites were vulnerable.

Record

Researcher

Ada Lerner, Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner

Published by

acmccs.github.io

Format

Whitepaper

Topic

Other

In the archive

• Collected in the 2016–17 research round

Tags

• sop-bypass
• same-origin-policy
• iframe
• javascript
• measurement-study
• defence
• owasp-a01-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Ada Lerner, Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 11 August 2026.