Online integrity and authentication checking for Quran electronic versions

Abstract

The ability to control data and information through the Internet can be challenging. Preliminary analysis showed that some tampering and forgery may occur to some words of the Quran in the electronic versions that span the Internet. Such small modifications may not be noticed by public audience. The holy book of Quran includes a unique feature in that its worldwide copies are all identical. The 114 chapters (Suras) and all their verses and words are preserved in the exact form. As such, we designed and evaluated a model and a tool to evaluate the integrity of the wording in the e-versions of the Quran through generating a Meta data related to all words in the Quran preserving the counts and locations. Such Meta data can be used in the same way hash algorithms are used in security to check the integrity of a disk and its data files where any small change in the data will result in a different hash value. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the different parameters and challenges that can impact the automatic authentication process of Quranic verses based on information retrieval and hashing algorithms.

Keywords

• Information retrieval
• Security
• Search engines
• Documents’ automatic evaluation
• Hashing algorithms
• Information authentication