The “Aloaha Time-Stamping Authority” is a cryptographic time stamping application that enables organizations or individuals to apply tamper-evident digital “Seals” to all forms of digital
information. It provides long-term and independent proof that the information existed at a particular point in time and has not been altered since.
The “Aloaha Time-Stamping Authority” provides Independently-Verifiable and Long-Lasting Proof of Electronic Record Authenticity
- The “Aloaha Time Stamping Authority” can be used to meet a broad range of data integrity objectives, including safeguarding critical documents against tampering and alteration, proving the authenticity of records, protecting digitally based intellectual property, preserving digital evidence, demonstrating regulatory compliance, and ensuring litigation readiness.
- An electronic signature does not offer proof of the time the signature was created. However, time is essential to determine the legal effects of a contract or any other document. This procedure is met by all existing Time Stamping Authorities (TSAs).
- The Aloaha TSA application is compatible to both RFC 31614 and Microsoft Authenticode digital time stamping standard. The Aloaha TSA application enables users to protect the
integrity and prove the authenticity of any form of digital data, including electronic documents and records, spreadsheets, web pages, digital evidence, emails, scanned images, video, audio, electronic health records, emails, photographs, source code, engineering and CAD diagrams, Xrays, audit logs, etc.
- For electronic documents or any other form of digital workflows to be time stamped, users need to send the digest6 of the document to a Time Stamping Authority which then in return adds the time to the digest, signs and archives it and then sends the resulting secured digital time stamping token in form of a digital signature back to the user.
- The content of the document to be time stamped does not need to be revealed to the Time Stamping Authority. The TSA processes only the digest7 of the document.
- Current TSAs exist in the form of hardware appliances or are offered in the form of hosted services. The latter require that users register and authenticate themselves. The users are
charged per each or bundled time stamps. The disadvantage is that such hardware installations and hosted processes are too complicated and expensive for single users or small enterprises lacking technological know how. The Aloaha TSA was designed to cater for disadvantages in the existing users economies of scale. Aloaha developed an application which is affordable and easy to use.
The innovative benefits of the Aloaha Time Stamping Authority Application
- Aloaha’s Time Stamping Authority runs on site and is fully in the possession of the user. The various standard interfaces and auto configuration mechanisms used by Aloaha contribute to a user friendly application. Furthermore there are no running timestamping costs or related registration expenses. It is a windows service application running with a zero total cost of ownership (zero TCO).
- Due to its unique time stamp request standard detection Aloaha is able to serve applications requiring different standards for time stamping. For example some office suites may request only RFC 3161 Time Stamps and others only Microsoft Authenticode Time Stamps. Aloaha is fully interoperable with different applications and protocols whether Aloaha’s or third parties’ software applications such as MS Office, Adobe Acrobat or SAP. This is a complete innovation in the industry.
- Another advantage of Aloaha is that issued Time Stamping Tokens are not archived at a service provider but are archived and cross-stamped in the user’s own network. This grants the users full archiving control without depending on other service providers. Furthermore the user is able to publish all issued time stamping tokens to public and cloud libraries (such as Google) for verification and credibility. All this without overhead expenses. The full archiving control attribute is an innovative value to the user
With easy-to-use Aloaha desktop products users can use the Time Stamping technology without complicated configuration processes and without any running expenses involved.
Integrations into existing products such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and SAP, commercially-available electronic content management systems is accomplished via scriptable
interfaces, local web services and a variety of software development kits. Organizations of all sizes can easily and cost-effectively use Aloaha to protect their critical digital information, no matter its format or where it resides.
Aloahas impact to existing processes.
Currently digital signatures become invalid once the underlying certificate expires. The validity of a digital certificate is always limited in time. Usually such time span is between 2 to 5
years. Additionally there is always the risk that a certificate has to be revoked with immediate effect following a key compromise or an algorithm change. In such cases the signatures issued by the related certificates are considered as null.
For example:
You sign a contract with your digital e-ID in September 2012. In October the e-ID was lost and replaced by a new one. In January 2013 a court has to determine if the electronic contract has been signed by the owner of the e-ID or a fraudster. Since the court cannot determine the time of the signature it cannot determine if the right owner of the revoked e-ID or the fraudster singed the contract. The contract is NULL. If the electronic signature would have been time stamped by Aloaha there would have been a non deniable proof of the signature time and thus the contract would be valid if signed before the lost of the e-ID.
The only way to secure a long-lasting proof of electronic records is to secure the used certificates against revocation and expiration. Until Aloaha’s innovation users could only archive such
documents to a tamper proof medium. Tamper proof mediums existed only in the physical world (in form of Paper, DVD and Microfiches9). This means that such users had to transfer such digital data to paper, DVD or Microfiche medium. Out of these three mediums only Microfiche is accredited as a long-lasting and auditable archiving medium. However the latter is not cost effective for small enterprises and individual users to use Microfiche as a medium to store records.
On the other hand paper needs good storage environment as it can deteriorate easily and data on DVD can be tampered and altered unless stored at a trustable environment (example: Notaries).
The Aloaha Time Stamping Authority comes also with an inbuilt web service to allow the user to connect other devices such as mobile phones, tablets, etc to the TSA.
Furthermore electronic archiving as used by the Aloaha TSA does not require any physical storage space; it is more cost effective and more ecological friendly.
Please contact info@aloaha.com for an evaluation version of the Aloaha TSA
