Enabling the Long-Term Archival of Signed Documents through Time Stamping

Abstract

In this paper we describe how to build a trusted reliable distributed service across administrative domains in a peer-to-peer network. The application we use to motivate our work is a public key time stamping service called Prokopius. The service provides a secure, verifiable but distributable stable archive that maintains time stamped snapshots of public keys over time. This in turn allows clients to verify time stamped documents or certificates that rely on formerly trusted public keys that are no longer in service or where the signer no longer exists. We find that such a service can time stamp the snapshots of public keys in a network of 148 nodes at the granularity of a couple of days, even in the worst case where an adversary causes the maximal amount of damage allowable within our fault model.