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Cyphernomicon 14.3

Other Advanced Crypto Applications:
Digital Timestamping


   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
 

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