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<aside> ✅ “Trusted timestamping is the process of securely keeping track of the creation and modification time of a document. Security here means that no one—not even the owner of the document—should be able to change it once it has been recorded provided that the timestamper’s integrity is never compromised.
The administrative aspect involves setting up a publicly available, trusted timestamp management infrastructure to collect, process and renew timestamps.”
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✅ Hyperfiles reference objects are uniquely located by their path. Editing of reference objects results in new transaction receipts that can be uniquely specified by including blockheight when querying objects.
Reference objects are published to the socialDB smart contract on NEAR and timestamps can be verified by either directly interacting with the blockchain from a local host (e.g. using tools like near-cli) or by searching in a public block explorer.
Learn more about the NEAR timestamp function here.
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<aside> ✅ “Linked timestamping is a type of trusted timestamping where issued time-stamps are related to each other.
Linked timestamping creates time-stamp tokens which are dependent on each other, entangled in some authenticated data structure. Later modification of the issued time-stamps would invalidate this structure. The temporal order of issued time-stamps is also protected by this data structure, making backdating of the issued time-stamps impossible, even by the issuing server itself.
The top of the authenticated data structure is generally published in some hard-to-modify and widely witnessed media, like printed newspaper or public blockchain. There are no (long-term) private keys in use, avoiding PKI-related risks.
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Linked timestamping is inherently more secure than the usual, public-key signature based time-stamping. All consequential time-stamps "seal" previously issued ones - hash chain (or other authenticated dictionary in use) could be built only in one way; modifying issued time-stamps is nearly as hard as finding a preimage for the used cryptographic hash function. Continuity of operation is observable by users; periodic publications in widely witnessed media provide extra transparency.
Tampering with absolute time values could be detected by users, whose time-stamps are relatively comparable by system design.
Absence of secret keys increases system trustworthiness. There are no keys to leak and hash algorithms are considered more future-proof[1] than modular arithmetic based algorithms, e.g. RSA.
Linked timestamping scales well - hashing is much faster than public key cryptography. There is no need for specific cryptographic hardware with its limitations.
The common technology[2] for guaranteeing long-term attestation value of the issued time-stamps (and digitally signed data[3]) is periodic over-time-stamping of the time-stamp token. Because of missing key-related risks and of the plausible safety margin of the reasonably chosen hash function this over-time-stamping period of hash-linked token could be an order of magnitude longer than of public-key signed token.
ISO 18014 part 3 covers 'Mechanisms producing linked tokens'.
American National Standard for Financial Services, "Trusted Timestamp Management and Security" (ANSI ASC X9.95 Standard) from June 2005 covers linking-based and hybrid time-stamping schemes.
There is no IETF RFC or standard draft about linking based time-stamping. RFC 4998 (Evidence Record Syntax) encompasses hash tree and time-stamp as an integrity guarantee for long-term archiving.