A Content Integrity Service for Long-Term Digital Archives

Overview

This paper presents a content integrity service for long-lived digital documents, especially for objects stored in long-term digital archives. The goal of the service is to demonstrate that information in the archive is authentic and has not been unintentionally or maliciously altered, even after its bit representation in the archive has undergone one or more transformations. The paper describes the design for an efficient, secure service that achieves this, and the implementation of the first prototype of such a service that is built for HP's Digital Media Platform. The solution relies on one-way hashing and digital time-stamping procedures.