Frederick Roeber wrote: > Does anybody have any info about the old Bell Labs internal document > timestamping system? <snip> > Back when I was advocating the time server, I tried to find papers > about this, but couldn't.
I was curious about this, and did a few minutes of research on Google. I think that the technology you're talking about was originally invented at Bellcore (not Bell Labs). The relevant paper seems to be by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," Journal of Cryptology, 3:99-111, 1991, available online at http://www.star-lab.com/stuart/dig-time-stamping.html (in PostScript format) along with a couple of other papers on digital timestamping. You can also find a PDF copy of the paper at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/54095817%2C244805%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http%253A%252F%252Fciteseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/11148/http%253AzSzzSzwww.star-lab.comzSzhaberzSzHS-how-to-TS.pdf/haber91how.pdf The information at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/haber91how.html shows 58 citations for this paper, so you should be able to find lots of additional papers that build on this work. Note that this technology was apparently patented and then spun off by Bellcore into a separate company, Surety, Inc. <http://www.surety.com/>. For more links to information on digital timestamping, including links to commercial timstamping services, see http://saturn.tcs.hut.fi/~helger/crypto/link/timestamping/ Hope you find this useful and interesting. Frank -- Frank Hecker [EMAIL PROTECTED]
