/[gzz]/manuscripts/bookburnings/techreport.rst
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revision 1.1 by benja, Wed Jul 16 15:13:19 2003 UTC revision 1.2 by benja, Wed Jul 16 15:51:58 2003 UTC
# Line 18  patenting this) Line 18  patenting this)
18  Introduction  Introduction
19  ============  ============
20    
21  - Documents on the Web transient  .. Documents on the Web transient
22  - A long-term storage system where past versions  
23    remain accessible as long as someone wants to  Documents on the Web are transient: They exist only as long
24    access them  as their publisher cares to maintain them. Often enough,
25  - Digital signatures for updateable documents  a link from a 1999 mailing list archive will not be
26    retrievable today, only a few years later.
27    
28    .. A long-term storage system where past versions
29       remain accessible as long as someone wants to
30       access them
31    
32    We envision a long-term storage system, in which documents
33    can be found as long as a copy exists *anywhere* in the
34    system, i.e., as long as *someone* still cares to
35    maintain a copy. After a document is updated, it should
36    still be possible to access its previous versions--
37    provided that somebody has kept a copy.
38    
39    It should not be possible for a publisher-- or for the
40    publisher's government-- to remove a document version
41    from the system, as long as someone-- possibly in a
42    different legislative domain-- holds a copy.
43    
44    In such a system, document identifiers must be
45    self-verifying; that is, having downloaded an
46    alleged copy of a document from some server in the network,
47    it must be possible to verify that this is a 'real'
48    copy of the document, not a forged version.
49    
50    For individual versions of documents, a cryptographic hash
51    of the version can be used as a self-verifying identifier.
52    In this document, we consider the more difficult problem
53    of providing self-verifying identifiers for documents
54    that can change over time.
55    
56    .. Digital signatures for updateable documents
57    
58    A simple approach would be to use
59    
60  - Keys expire and are revoked  - Keys expire and are revoked
61  - The usual approach: Certificate Authorities (CAs)  - The usual approach: Certificate Authorities (CAs)
62    plus Time Stamping Services (TSSs)    plus Time Stamping Services (TSSs)

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