Re: third-party datestamp site?

David G. Durand (dgd@cs.bu.edu)
Wed, 17 Mar 1999 08:58:21 -0500


At 8:21 AM -0500 3/17/99, James Tauber wrote:
>Here's an idea for a site:
>
>You submit a document and it returns a date-dependent digital signature for
>the document for a small fee.
>
>Another party can submit your document with the date it was supposed to have
>been submitted on and the site verifies it.
>
>Third-party date stamping over the web. Does such a beast currently exist?
>Or is this stupid?
>
>James

My wife's friend Stuart haber is co-inventor of the standard way to do this
(cryptographically chained timestamped hash codes). There are a few URLs of
citations, etc. And they did start a company (Surety), to commercialize the
technology. I don't know healthy the business is.

I stuck in one of the many other sites offering some variation of this service.

The thing I like about Stuart's service is that there's a need to have a
public "hash code of record," every so often so that clients and courts
don't have to depend on trusting the hash authotirty. They use dead-tree
broadcast replication of identical bits: by publishing a classified ad in
the NYT every day -- thus leaving a tough-to-falsify audit trail of
sufficient permanence for commercial transactions.

-- David

http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/chapter14/14.3.html
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~dmjones/hbp/jcrypt/Authors/haberstuart.html

http://www.surety.com/

http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm

research courtesy of typing "timestamp" into Sherlock...
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Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst
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