A digital time stamp 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 time stamp signature) to the existence of your data. We never see your data; it is that simple and here is how it works:

The e-TimeStamp process consists of 2 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 time stamp certificate that contains your file's fingerprint.

click to enlarge

This method of creating a time stamp was published in public standards and laws; how to create a time stamp was not invented by DigiStamp. The digital time stamp was defined as part of the technology called Digital Signatures, or PKI. 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 time stamps here.

A Fingerprint

When you time stamp 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 in the "U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard" here.

The Internet

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 time stamp 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.

Click to enlarge the illustration of a "printed" certificate A time stamp certificate is commonly not printed becuse it is contained in a digital file.

Your Certificates

We give you software to store and manage your timestamp certificates. Each certificate can be used later to verify that the contents of your file existed at a point-in-time. The content and the format of a digital time stamp are defined by common standards and therefore can be verifed using a variety of vendor's software.

The process is safe, your file is never sent across the Internet. The process is reliable, the time stamp certificate proves that your file and its contents existed at a point-in-time.

	Would you like more details? A good place to start is our Frequently Asked Questions.
	Create an account and download the free software. Your first 25 document times stamps costs only $10.
	Read about the security and trust of a digital time stamp here.
	Information on the international standards for a Time Stamp Authority (RFC3161) and the technology here.