A distributed Integrity Catalog for digital repositories

2019

Over any time frame that spans multiple generations of information technology, there is uncertainty whether digital objects or outputs from digital objects can be verified as the same things they were originally. The Preservation as a Service for Trust (PaaST)Project of the InterPARES Trust collaboration addressed this challenge with the objective of enabling determination of wether preserved digital information objects remain authentic. This paper, first presented at the InterPARES International Symposium in San Jose, Costa Rica on 19 February 2020, sets out the conceptualization of authenticity that guided the articulation of functional and data 1 requirements to support verifiable preservation and, thus provide a foundation of trust. It then summarizes the services that comprise the requirements and discusses the variety of ways the services can be implemented.

2009

We study the problem of authenticating the content and creation time of documents generated by an organization and retained in archival storage. Recent regulations (e.g., the Sarbanes-Oxley act and the Securities and Exchange Commission rule) mandate secure retention of important business records for several years. We provide a mechanism to authenticate bulk repositories of archived documents. In our approach, a space efficient local data structure encapsulates a full document repository in a short (e.g., 32-byte) digest. Periodically registered with a trusted party, these commitments enable compact proofs of both document creation time and content integrity. The data structure, an append-only persistent authenticated dictionary, allows for efficient proofs of existence and non-existence, improving on state-of-the-art techniques. We confirm through an experimental evaluation with the Enron email corpus its feasibility in practice.

First workshop on on …, 2009

A growing amount of digital objects is designated for long term preservation -a time scale during which technologies, formats and communities are very likely to change. Specialized approaches, models and technologies are needed to guarantee the long-term understandability of the preserved data. Maintaining the authenticity (trustworthiness) and provenance (history of creation, ownership, accesses and changes) of the preserved objects for the long term is of great importance, since users must be confident that the objects in the changed environment are authentic. We present a novel model for managing authenticity in long term digital preservation systems and a supporting archival storage component. The model and archival storage build on OAIS, the leading standard in the area of long-term digital preservation. The preservation aware storage layer handles provenance data, and documents the relevant events. It collocates provenance data (and other metadata) together with the preserved data in a secure environment, thus enhancing the chances of their co-survival. Handling authenticity and provenance at the storage layer reduces both threats to authenticity and computation times. This work addresses core issues in long-term digital preservation in a novel and practical manner. We present an example of managing authenticity of data objects during data transformation at the storage component. 1

To make digital resources on the web verifiable, immutable, and permanent, we propose a technique to include cryptographic hash values in URIs. We call them trusty URIs and we show how they can be used for approaches like nanopublications to make not only specific resources but their entire reference trees verifiable. Digital artifacts can be identified not only on the byte level but on more abstract levels such as RDF graphs, which means that resources keep their hash values even when presented in a different format. Our approach sticks to the core principles of the web, namely openness and decentralized architecture, is fully compatible with existing standards and protocols, and can therefore be used right away. Evaluation of our reference implementations shows that these desired properties are indeed accomplished by our approach, and that it remains practical even for very large files.

2009

In today's world, information is increasingly created, processed, transmitted, and stored digitally. While the digital nature of information has brought enormous benefits, it has also created new vulnerabilities and attacks against data. Unlike physical documents, digitally stored information can be rapidly copied, erased, or modified. The distributed nature of today's computing systems also implies that digital data may be stored in or transmitted via untrusted systems. In many cases, even insiders can have financial or strategic motives to tamper with data. Thus, throughout its lifecycle, data may be exposed to many modifications, and be processed by many principals, some of whom may not be trustworthy. In order to trust data, it is therefore useful to know its history, and to protect data history from illicit modifications. Widespread use of electronic records in high-stakes applications such as business and health-care means that the need to ensure trustworthiness of data retention is crucial. Society as a whole will benefit significantly from the development and adoption of techniques for ensuring the integrity of data history, as such assurances will increase public trust in electronic records.

International Journal of Computers and Applications, 2018

Keeping track of lifecycle history and information origins are important because that is the only key issue to confirm information probative value and integrity. Provenance information management (Data Provenance) has recently been gained significant interest in computer security specifically in the domain of distributed environment. This is due partly to the increased in digital facts (complexity and size) and it widely spread usage in other fields of study, such as medicine, government, commerce, and science. Although its applications and use bring numerous benefit to scholars and practitioners, challenges still exist in its lifecycle history and information management. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of potentially influential components on provenance collection and its security, which enables us to investigate and summarize the current trends, methods and techniques addressing the aforementioned elements. This review provides more insight for researchers, system developers and engineers working on data, data mining and information security. More than 90 research publications on provenance collection and security have been examined, classified and listed for reference.

2002

Informacijos mokslai, 2018

A growing amount of digital objects is designated for long term preservation-a time scale during which technologies, formats and communities are very likely to change. Specialized approaches, models and technologies are needed to guarantee the long-term understandability of the preserved data. Maintaining the authenticity (trustworthiness) and provenance (history of creation, ownership, accesses and changes) of the preserved objects for the long term is of great importance, since users must be confident that the objects in the changed environment are authentic. We present a novel model for managing authenticity in long term digital preservation systems and a supporting archival storage component. The model and archival storage build on OAIS, the leading standard in the area of long-term digital preservation. The preservation aware storage layer handles provenance data, and documents the relevant events. It collocates provenance data (and other metadata) together with the preserved data in a secure environment, thus enhancing the chances of their co-survival. Handling authenticity and provenance at the storage layer reduces both threats to authenticity and computation times. This work addresses core issues in long-term digital preservation in a novel and practical manner. We present an example of managing authenticity of data objects during data transformation at the storage component. 1

25th National Conference of the Nigeria Computer Society , 2016

The integrity of digital assets has become increasingly important owing to the high rate of cybercrimes and cyber-related offences in recent times. The pervasive nature of the Internet and the concomitant migration of most business functions to the cloud make it pertinent to deploy more veritable means of enforcing the integrity of data, information, databases, disk volumes and data warehouses. One of such veritable means of affirming the authenticity of the contents rendered both offline and online is the use of hashing. In this paper, the processes involved in creating a database of hash codes, which will contain hash values that are unique for some datasets was discussed. Emphasis was laid on the use of the hash codes to verify the non-alteration or otherwise of stored contents in a bid to enforce data integrity. It is assumed that the paper will help various categories of users to protect their digital assets without having to resort to computationally expensive mechanisms.

Since 1998 CILEA (now merged into CINECA) has been archiving, managing and disseminating digital cultural resources within academic libraries, historical archives and museums. Over the years several solutions have been developed, due to the peculiarities of the resources to be managed and to the continuous evolution of digital preservation paradigms and technologies. From 2008 CILEA provides a Digital Preservation and Curation Service compliant with the major requirements of the OAIS model and, in the last months, started a process of self-audit, following the recommendations of the ISO/DIS 16363 "Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories" (the so called "Magenta Book"). In particular two different platforms, including also digital preservation features, were developed for cultural resources. One for Electronic Journals management (NERA) is built upon the open source software Fedora Commons, the other (CodeX [ml]) is aimed at the preservation of digital cultural heritage (mainly ancient books and manuscripts) and was completely in-house developed. The decision of implementing two different platforms is closely related to the different nature of the documents to be preserved. Moreover CILEA has developed also the DigA (Digital Archiving) platform, built upon Fedora Commons, to be considered a Platform as a Service for Digital Preservation. All the Digital Preservation Services, currently managing nearly nine million objects, are continuously improved in order to fulfill the requirements of the Magenta Book. The proposed contribution is aimed at explaining the latest implementations carried out in order to bring CILEA's (and now CINECA's) digital preservation services to the rank of Trusted Digital Repositories (automatic check of data integrity through checksum, implementation of the PREMIS standard, etc.).