A Model for Long-term Preservation of Digital Signature Validity: TrustChain (original) (raw)
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Long-term Preservation of Digital Signatures
Digitally born documents are increasingly being signed by digital signatures. Once becoming records, they need to be preserved – in some cases for several years while in other cases permanently. In essence, what should be preserved besides digital records themselves, is their trustworthiness. This may be a problem because digital records might be converted to new formats, migrated to new media, emulated or virtualised in new environments due to the technological obsolescence. Authenticity, in particular, relies on the possibility to check the validity of the digital signature. However, digital signatures expire after a certain period. The author investigates the possibilities of long-term preservation of digitally signed records in the ever-changing IT environment.
Journal of Research and Development, 2019
The project explores the use of digital documents as a response to the problems presented by physical documents, since they are at risk of partial or total loss. The solution is the digitalization that plays a very important role in society and the contemporary world. This helps sustainability and the preservation of natural resources. The security of the archives is a necessity that requires as solution to use the technology of public key infrastructure (PKI) to generate a digital document, besides registering the public and private keys of the personnel that has the legal power to sign them. These documents are stored on an official server and distributed among the registered hosts of the network. This certificate will help to detect changes in an unauthorized way, when comparing the document with the original. In this phase of distributed verification, the Blockchain technology will be used. Then the proposal is to build a tool to generate digital documents, in addition to managing public keys, transaction logs and records. The use of Blockchain will allow to establish and configure a Peer to Peer (P2P) network for a secure exchange. Public Key, Blockchain, Digital document Resumen En este proyecto se explora el uso de documentos digitales como respuesta a los problemas que presentan los documentos físicos ya que éstos corren el riesgo de pérdida parcial o total. La solución es la digitalización que juega un papel muy importante en la sociedad y el mundo contemporáneo. Esto debido a que ayuda a la sustentabilidad y a la preservación de los recursos naturales. La seguridad de los archivos es una necesidad que requiere como solución utilizar la tecnología de infraestructura de llave pública (PKI, por sus siglas en inglés) para generar un documento digital, además de registrar las llaves públicas y privadas del personal que tiene el poder legal de firmarlos. Estos documentos se almacenan en un servidor oficial, y se distribuirán entre los hosts registrados de la red. Este certificado ayudará a detectar cambios de forma no autorizada, al compararse el documento con el original. En esta fase de verificación distribuida se utilizará la tecnología de Blockchain. Se propone entonces la construcción de una herramienta que permita generar documentos digitales, además de administrar las llaves públicas, bitácoras de transacciones y registros. El uso de Blockchain permitirá establecer y configurar una red Peer to Peer (P2P) para un intercambio seguro.
Long-term Preservation of Validity of Electronically Signed Records
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The authors explain the context in which electronic records are being preserved. They explain the concept of authentic electronic records and proceed with the analysis of the technologies supporting trust in electronic records. They start by explaining the Public Key Infrastructure as the requirement for electronic signatures, digital certificates, the concept of non-repudiation, trusted archive service, timestamps and trusted digital timestamping. Further, they analyse formats of electronic signatures – XMLDSig, XAdES, CAdES, PAdES – and their possible influence on the long-term preservation of validity of electronically signed records. The authors conclude that although strict requirements of certain types of electronic signatures can ensure authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation of preserved records, they will still require preservation action on the level of medium and files.
Archain: a Novel Blockchain Based Archival System
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In this paper, we present a novel archival system called ARCHAIN, developed for the State Archive-keeping Committee of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia). Blockchain is the principal part of the system, which stores transactions (facts of transfer of documents to the archive) in a protected form. The developed system uses a permissioned blockchain model due to the customer's requirement for the presence of a trusted center. Index Terms-blockchain, archival science, cryptography
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First areas where the blockchain technology dominated were financial sectors for the secure trading, exchanging or supply-chain of assets. Then cryptocurrencies started to exchange not only money, but also objects. They developed the concept of DApps (decentralized applications) introducing the third blockchain generation. Despite all different areas where blockchain can be used today, in this paper we are focused in secure document management. The idea of the system we present, called DMS-XT, is to store not the whole content of a document, but after properly getting an extract from the unstructured content of pdf documents using Information Extraction techniques, and encrypting it, then storing it in the blockchain. Whoever wants to verify the ownership and content, can do so by retrieving and decrypting this information-view stored in the blockchain. To test the system accuracy and performance we suggest applying it in Education, for the secure storage and quality assurance of di...
Digital Archives Relying on Blockchain: Overcoming the Limitations of Data Immutability
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Archives, both analogue and digital, are primarily concerned with preserving records as originals. Because of this, immutable data as used in a blockchain data structure seem a logical choice when designing such systems. At the same time, archives maintain records which may need to change over the long term. It is a requirement of archival preservation to be able to update records’ metadata in order not only to guarantee authenticity after digital preservation actions but also to ensure that relationships to other records, which might be created after an original record has entered the archive (and has been registered in a blockchain), can be maintained. The need to maintain an archival bond, which represents a network of relationships between aggregation of records, i.e., the relationship connecting previous and subsequent records belonging to the same activity, is a prime example of this requirement. This paper explores realisation of the archival bond in the context of blockchain-based archival system by proposing a supporting database system which enables metadata to be changed as required but also significantly simplifies searching compared to searching on-chain information, while keeping the immutability characteristic of blockchain.