Authentic Time-Stamps for Archival Storage

The authors study the problem of authenticating the content and creation time of documents generated by an organization and retained in archival storage. Recent regulations (e.g., The Sarbanes-Oxley act and the Securities and Exchange Commission rule) mandate secure retention of important business records for several years. This paper provides a mechanism to authenticate bulk repositories of archived documents. In the approach, a space efficient local data structure encapsulates a full document repository in a short (e.g., 32-byte) digest.