How to time-stamp a digital document

✍ Scribed by Stuart Haber; W. Scott Stornetta

• Book ID: 104659350
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 806 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0933-2790
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00196791

✦ Synopsis

The prospect of a world in which all text, audio, picture, and video documents are in digital form on easily modifiable media raises the issue of how to certify when a document was created or last changed. The problem is to time-stamp the data, not the medium. We propose computationally practical procedures for digital time-stamping of such documents so that it is infeasible for a user either to back-date or to forward-date his document, even with the collusion of a time-stamping service. Our procedures maintain complete privacy of the documents themselves, and require no record-keeping by the time-stamping service.