14.3.1. digital timestamping
- The canonical reference for digital timestamping is the
work of Stu Haber and Scott Stornetta, of Bellcore. Papers
presented at various Crypto conferences. Their work
involves having the user compute a hash of the document he
wishes to be stamped and sending the hash to them, where
they merge this hash with other hashes (and all previous
hashes, via a tree system) and then they *publish* the
resultant hash in a very public and hard-to-alter forum,
such as in an ad in the Sunday "New York Times."
In their parlance, such an ad is a "widely witnessed
event," and attempts to alter all or even many copies of
the newspaper would be very difficult and expensive. (In a
sense, this WWE is similar to the "beacon" term Eric Hughes
used.)
Haber and Stornetta plan some sort of commercial operation
to do this.
This service has not yet been tested in court, so far as I
know. The MIT server is an experiment, and is probably
useful for experimenting. But it is undoubtedly even less
legally significant, of course.
14.3.2. my summary
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind