How a digital timestamp works

A digital timestamp gives you proof that the contents of your work existed at a point-in-time and that the contents have not changed since that time. The procedures maintain complete privacy of your documents themselves. The result is simple, secure, independent and portable proof of electronic record integrity. In summary, it is called a digital signature. Use our service to provide an external witness (a timestamp signature) to the existence of your data, like an electronic or digital notary. We never see your actual data; it is that simple and here is how it works:

The trusted TimeStamp process consists of two parts:

• Software on your computer records the fingerprint of your file. You can download software for free or use products like Adobe Acrobat, e-Lock, and others.

• The Internet links you to the DigiStamp web-based security service. We return to you a signed electronic timestamp certificate that contains your file's fingerprint.

This method of creating a timestamp was published in public standards and laws; how to create a timestamp was not invented by DigiStamp. The digital timestamp was defined as part of the technology called Digital Signatures, or PKI (Public Key Insfrastructure). DigiStamp uses this accepted method and then adds an external audit and certified hardware to create a web-based security service that you can trust and afford.

Wikipedia provides a definition of digital timestamps here.

A fingerprint of your computer file is created by our free software

When you timestamp a file, your computer creates a unique identifier, or fingerprint, for the file (a SHA-256 Hash). The fingerprint is a unique number calculated from the file's contents. Mathematicians call this a hash function. If the file's contents were to change by even one character, a different number would be calculated. This accepted technique provides a design whereby it is computationally infeasible to find two different messages which produce the same number. Your data remains private in this process: Only the evidence (a document fingerprint) is transmitted to DigiStamp, and we never see your actual document. None of the content of your data can be determined from the fingerprint, so reverse engineering of the fingerprint into the document is not possible. Read more about the SHA hash at wikipedia or the "U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard" here.

The Internet links you to DigiStamp for the timestamp

DigiStamp is a TimeStamp Authority (TSA). By using the Internet, you electronically send the file's fingerprint to the DigiStamp computer. At the DigiStamp computer, we put the file's fingerprint and the current time into an envelope and add our digital signature. The result is a digital timestamp certificate that is returned and stored in your computer software. The process is safe; your file is never sent across the Internet, only the file's smaller fingerprint.