Could one imagine imagining equipment cryptographically signing the images they spit out?
(Sorry if this is a super naive HN-esque comment – the topic is far outside my field, and I don't mean to actually suggest this as a solution, I'm just curious.)
These sort of images are typically re-arranged to fit nicely in a figure for publication. It's now more common that any figure that has a western blot within it, you also have to provide the raw unaltered image. Though this wasn't standard practice at the time.
As someone in the field, western blots are terrible for a number of reasons. Even if you get nice bands and you're honest about what you show. The companies that make the antibodies for these commonly sell people duds that will bind to a number of unknown things, and people blindly trust that since the website said it's specific for protein-XYZ, that's what they're measuring.
(Sorry if this is a super naive HN-esque comment – the topic is far outside my field, and I don't mean to actually suggest this as a solution, I'm just curious.)