DIGITAL TIME STAMPING

DIGITAL TIME STAMPING

ABSTRACT

Be it a multinational company or a small office, now-a-days, everybody is using computers for storing and communicating data. They need security assurance. Also, if a satisfactory security scheme is found out, many companies will like to convert there old physical paper records (which still have legal force) to electronic documents due to its advantages like ease of storage management.
Whenever credibility of a document is in question, signature, stamp or other such information on the document is used for verification. However, such validation schemes do not directly apply for digital documents as these can be easily copied or modified without leaving a trace.
One of the security requirements asks for a technique to associate time with the document. This is a general requirement useful in establishing relative time ordering of the documents. Coupled with Digital Signature, this produces a robust scheme for authentication.
In this report, we go on building a secure “Timestamping” scheme, almost from scratch, adding features in evolutionary manner while addressing different security concerns. The main focus of the schemes will be on reducing - “trust requirements” expected by both author and verifier of the document from the third party issuing the timestamps.
In the end, a more sophisticated scheme, used for distributed Timestamping environment, called Prokopius, is introduced.

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