From: Government Security News

By: Jacob Goodwin

Diagram from timestamping patent

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plans to grant an exclusive license to a Santa Barbara, CA-based firm, RSIP, LLC, to use a NIST patent for what is called “Digital Timestamping.”

Under this royalty-bearing license, RSIP would be able to utilize U.S. patent number 6,393,566, titled Timestamp Service for the National Information Network.

“The invention is a system and method for time-stamping and signing a digital document by an authenticating party and returning the signed stamped document to the originator or his designated recipient,” explains a Federal Register notice published by NIST on June 29. “Messages may be received by a first ‘public’ machine over a network, by fax, or through input mediums such as diskettes.”

Further information about this licensing arrangement is available from Cathy Cohn, of NIST’s technology partnerships office, at 301-975-6691 or cathleen.cohn@nist.gov.

The official U.S. patent says the original application was submitted in July 1995 and the inventor is Judah Levine.

“The clock of the first machine is synchronized with Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) and can be checked for accuracy by anyone on the network,” the NIST notice explains. “A second ‘private’ machine, not connected to any network, receives the time-stamped message, applies a hashing procedure and provides a signature using a private key. The signed hashed time-stamped message is then returned.

“A verify procedure is made widely available to check the genuineness of a document by rehashing the document and applying a public key,” the notice continues. “The result should match the signed time-stamped message returned by the authenticating party.”

In the official U.S. patent, the applicant describes the logic behind the invention.

“The authenticity of signed paper documents is attested to by signing the document in the presence of a Notary Public,” says the patent application. “The Notary Public usually adds a permanent alteration to the document such as an impression of a seal together with the signature of the Notary and the date upon which the Notary witnessed the signature which is being authenticated.

“There are many situations where it is important to prove that a digital document existed on a certain date and time in its current form,” the application continues. “Sometimes it is also important to establish the authorship or at least the ownership of the digital document on that same day. Examples include the Disclosure of Inventions, ordinary commercial transactions such as Bills of Sale, or Payments of Invoices, Wills, and other contracts where time is a factor. While conventional Notaries Public can meet the need for ordinary documents written on paper, there is currently no generally available analogous service for documents that are in digital format. Examples of such documents include computer files generated by word processors or spreadsheet programs, and binary files such as compiled computer programs and digitized or scanned images such as are produced by scanners or facsimile machines. It is also needed to establish the authorship and date of creation for digital audio and digital video recordings.”