Abstract
The prospect of a world in which all text, audio, picture, and video documents are in digital form on easily modifiable media raises the issue of how to certify when a document was created or last changed. The problem is to time-stamp the data, not the medium. We propose computationally practical procedures for digital time-stamping of such documents so that it is infeasible for a user either to back-date or to forward-date his document, even with the collusion of a time-stamping service. Our procedures maintain complete privacy of the documents themselves, and require no record-keeping by the time-stamping service.
References
J. Alter. When photographs lie. Newsweek, pp. 44–45, July 30, 1990.
M. Blum and S. Micali. How to generate cryptographically strong sequences of pseudo-random bits. SIAM J. Comput., 13(4): 850–864, Nov. 1984.
G. Brassard and M. Yung. One-way group actions. In Advances in Cryptology—Crypto '90. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, to appear.
I. Damgård. Collision-free hash functions and public-key signature schemes. In Advances in Cryptology—Eurocrypt '87, pp. 203–217. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 304, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1988.
I. Damgård. A design principle for hash functions. In Advances in Cryptology—Crypto '89 (ed. G. Brassard), pp. 416–427. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 435, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1990.
A. DeSantis and M. Yung. On the design of provably secure cryptographic hash functions. In Advances in Cryptology—Eurocrypt '90. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, to appear.
W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman. New directions in cryptography. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 22: 644–654, Nov. 1976.
Z. Galil, S. Haber, and M. Yung. Interactive public-key cryptosystems. Submitted for publication, 1990.
S. Goldwasser and S. Micali. Probabilistic encryption. J. Comput. System Sci., 28: 270–299, April 1984.
S. Goldwasser, S. Micali, and R. Rivest. A secure digital signature scheme. SIAM J. Comput., 17(2): 281–308, 1988.
A. Grundberg. Ask it no questions: The camera can lie. The New York Times, Section 2, pp. 1, 29, August 12,1990.
R. Impagliazzo, L. Levin, and M. Luby. Pseudorandom generation from one-way functions. In Proc. 21st STOC, pp. 12–24. ACM, New York, 1989.
R. Impagliazzo and M. Luby. One-way functions are essential for complexity-based cryptography. In Proc. 30th FOCS, pp. 230–235. IEEE, New York, 1989.
H. M. Kanare. Writing the Laboratory Notebook, p. 117. American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1985.
R. C. Merkle. Secrecy, authentication, and public-key systems. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1979.
R. C. Merkle. One-way hash functions and DES. In Advances in Cryptology-3-Crypto '89 (ed. G. Brassard), pp. 428–446. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 435, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1990.
M. Naor and M. Yung. Universal one-way hash functions and their cryptographic applications. In Proc. 21st STOC, pp. 33–43. ACM, New York, 1989.
M. O. Rabin. Digitalized signatures. In Foundations of Secure Computation (ed.) R. A. DeMillo et al., pp. 155–168. Academic Press, New York, 1978.
R. Rivest. The MD4 message digest algorithm. In Advances in Cryptology—Crypto '90. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, to appear.
J. Rompel. One-way functions are necessary and sufficient for secure signatures. In Proc. 22nd STOC, pp. 387–394. ACM, New York, 1990.
C. Shannon. Prediction and entropy of printed English. Bell System Tech. J., 30: 50–64, 1951.
A. C. Yao. Theory and applications of trapdoor functions. In Proc. 23rd FOCS, pp. 80–91. IEEE, New York, 1982.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Haber, S., Stornetta, W.S. How to time-stamp a digital document. J. Cryptology 3, 99–111 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00196791
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00196791
Key words
- Time-stamp
- Hash