Secure Media Timestamping: Challenges, Solutions, and Frameworks

Inhalt:
Timestamping is vital for preserving the integrity and authenticity of digital data. However, current systems are susceptible to vulnerabilities such as timestamp manipulation and denial of service attacks. This paper investigates these challenges and proposes solutions to mitigate them. Two primary issues are identified: demonstrating recent media creation and preventing timestamp fabrication. Various existing solutions, including metadata embedding, watermarking, blockchain, and stenography, are assessed for their efficacy. Based on this analysis, the paper establishes design requirements for secure timestamping, emphasizing secure time-proving knowledge acquisition, embedding during media creation, and verification facilitation. Three key stakeholders are identified: the prover, verifier, and timestamping server, with the objective of enhancing security and reliability in digital recordkeeping and transactions across diverse domains. Two frameworks are proposed: one involving media generation at the timestamping server and another with server-supervised media generation by the prover.