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Show HN: Seal – Verifiable timestamp for your private ideas
- arvindsgulati 4y agoThis could be implemented via blockchain too , where in you can prove that you had posted the idea before a certain block was mined. Timestamping blocks can be done via schilling coin based oracle.
- tjpnz 4y agoI think it's already a thing. See proof of existence.
- olejorgenb 4y agohttps://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/ use the same idea (using a merkle tree to make it cheap per document) with the bitcoin.
- gusan 4y agoHere is a rough one I wrote that uses Optimism (Ethereum Layer2) https://sonotoki.org/ https://sonotoki.org/
- RicoElectrico 4y agoIn Poland you can use "podpis zaufany" to sign a file, which also records the date of signing. The only thing you need is a bank account which was verified using your physical ID. The best UX, I think, is with PDF files - others are encapsulated in an XML Base64 container. Everyone can verify a signature with no account necessary.
- leaflets2 4y agoA polish bank account I suppose?
- dlor 4y agoA bunch of comments below indicated that this is technically an abuse of the CT logs. Feel free to use Sigstore instead for this, it's basically the same architecture as CT logs except we officially support and endorse this use case. https://www.sigstore.dev/ https://www.sigstore.dev/
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoOne other thing you can do for resilience, is periodically (say every 6 months or so) take out a full page ad in The NY Times with the hashes. These newspapers tend to be archived all over the world by multiple people, and are another way to provide proof that something was published by a certain date.
- kanzure 4y agoThere's also https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/ for timestamping into the bitcoin blockchain using a 'calendar aggregation' concept. Clients get back a merkle tree of hashes that can be used to show inclusion in a published hash on the blockchain. I've been using opentimestamps/ots for a few years now. It can be used to show a specific version of a file existed as early as the proof date. Unfortunately the only other value seems to be showing that if you had doctored a file then that happened at least as early as the timestamp and not later.
- DreamFlasher 4y agoWhat can you achieve with such a proof?
- moralestapia 4y agoProof that something was there at some time in the past + proof that the contents haven't been tampered with.
- kanzure 4y agoIt's only proof that the contents (should it match the original hash) haven't been tampered with after the timestamping.
- kanzure 4y agobacklink to a related recent discussion: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-June/thread.html#20564 https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022...
- nstart 4y agoFor anyone who’s interested in a quick and dirty way to do it, I just post the sha256 to Twitter/some public forum and reveal when I feel like it
- mleonhard 4y agoI'm working on a text-based protocol for making and verifying timestamps of documents and live-streams. It uses SHA3-512 only. https://github.com/mleonhard/tokimark https://github.com/mleonhard/tokimark
- jschveibinz 4y agoI like this concept! Good luck with this.
- philips 4y agoI love these sorts of hacks. In fact I did something similar with a project called rget[1] two thoughts: 1. My project got politely asked to not use the ct log and lets encrypt infra this way. Since you are only doing it every 12 hours you might be ok. 2. Sigstore[2] seems like it might be a good match and their infra is designed for lots of small fast one off sigs. [1]: https://merklecounty.substack.com/p/rget-a-secure-download-user-story https://merklecounty.substack.com/p/rget-a-secure-download-u... [2]: https://sigstore.dev https://sigstore.dev
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoAbusing CT log is unethical. For practical purposes DKIM signatures in emails would do the trick. Write an email to yourself, or to someone you trust, its DKIM will include the timestamp and it can be verified publicly.
- redfast00 4y agoThe DKIM idea will not work: some email servers intentionally publish their expired DKIM keys to avoid people leaking mails (https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/11/16/ok-google-please-publish-your-dkim-secret-keys/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/11/16/ok-googl...)
- lupire 4y agoA cleaner, simper solution to that is for email clients to delete the DKIM info immediately upon receipt.
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoGoogle does not. In many ways, non-repudiation property of emails is a boon. We do not hear much about it, but I bet that many thousands of legal disputes are settled once people realize that their emails can be verified via DKIM signatures. The fact that it allows to verify the authenticity of leaked emails is only a small and not necessarily negative side-effect.
- IshKebab 4y agoI don't see why it matters. Sounds like they aren't going to be registering many domains. Looks like they register something like 4 domains a day, which is completely insignificant.
- productceo 4y agoSeems like an interesting problem, but I have zero background knowledge. Could you share who would use this and why?
- IshKebab 4y agoIf you want to prove you had an idea first, or something like that.
- onethought 4y agoOutside of patents, which is already a thing, with a very large legal framework around it. Why is that important?
- geraldwhen 4y agoUnder Obama, the America invents acts switched patent IP ownership to first to file. Inventing something first no longer matters in patent law.
- IshKebab 4y agoPride I guess? I'm sure there are other uses. This idea has been done many times before (e.g. with blockchains).
- self 4y agoThis has been done for a while. Two links: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping - https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-bl... The company in the second link: http://www.surety.com/ http://www.surety.com/
- pearjuice 4y agoHow is this better than hashing a txt document with a claim which has a timestamp in it? shasum -a 512 filewithtimestamp.txt
- Skunkleton 4y agoecho I totally made this file five years ago > filewithtimestamp.txt This approach uses LE as a trusted third party. The date on the cert is valid if you trust letsencrypt.
- zarzavat 4y agoYou can hash the text document, upload the hash to some trusted third party, e.g. if archive.org indexes your website.
- IshKebab 4y agoIt's verifiable. Your approach is just "trust me bro".
- greenhorn123 4y agoIn other news: employees of letsencrypt have unexpected windfall due to their massive library of prior art, which they are apparently willing to nix after suitable payment has been received.
- ithkuil 4y agoI don't understand, what do you mean?
- anilgulecha 4y agoThis is a good hack, even with some very light abuse (once per 12 hours) of CT logs. I don't see the need to build new tech though. It should be trivial to build a CRUD layer over git repo (which uses a merkle tree DAG) - and you get public logs to boot, including simple hosting and wide tooling. Immutable commits maintained in a public tree. This could also be combined with the above hack (using commit id).
- michaelmior 4y agoI'm confused how a git repo would help. You can easily write commits in the past. e.g. git commit --date="10 day ago" -m "Your commit message"
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoOnly to the HEAD. If you publish the repo somewhere that does not do garbage collection, this can work.
- transpa-regency 4y agoIf you have a third party sign your git commits, you no longer can no longer modify the commit later undetectedly. And if someone puts their log of signatures into another git repository, you can create an entire web of timestamped trust. https://netfuture.ch/2022/02/git-pgp-blockchain-comparison/ https://netfuture.ch/2022/02/git-pgp-blockchain-comparison/
- michaelmior 4y agoThis is true. Although now this is starting to pretty closely approach what the OP is doing, just using another store for the signatures instead of the CT log.
- michaelmior 4y agoWhy does the fact that you can only do that to the HEAD matter? I can still fake any time in the past. Also, I'm not aware of any public host that does not do garbage collection. But even if that were the case, you still need to trust whatever the repository host is.
- eps 4y agoAlternatively, every large CA maintains a public TSA server (time-stamping authority), because it's an integral part of the code signing framework. These are meant for high loads, so they can be used to sign each document individually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping#Trusted_(digital)_timestamping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping#Trusted_(...
- losfair 4y agoI previously came across TSA but it seems that they don't log to a public ledger like the CT log?
- eps 4y agoWhy would they log into a public ledger? That's not how the PKI works.
- losfair 4y agoPKI works nicely under its presumptions, but a public ledger (like CT where TLS certificates are logged to) is a useful enhancement to it. That way you can actually verify things instead of just trusting the CA.
- headsoup 4y agoI'm not sure what the value proposition is here. Is the idea that you want to use this later to tell others you had the idea first, or to protect your IP? If so, I could definitely see people noting every conceivable idea they can imagine to claim rights later ... Otherwise, is it because I don't trust my past self to be accurate? Or to prove to 3rd parties you absolutely did what you said you did at a time? In which case it's not private.
- XorNot 4y agoIn some patent law jurisdictions, date of invention trumps date of filing if you can show evidence.
- headsoup 4y agoHence my comment on people spamming ideas to front-run it. Other than that, I can't really see a need for this that is for private use.
- lupire 4y agoI want to show everyone how smart I am about predicting current events, or prove that I knew some secret event happened, without my prediction causing interference.
- realharo 4y agoYou can just publish encrypted text as a GitHub gist (or use any other large public site where you can't modify the timestamps), and then release the decryption keys later. Or only publish a hash that used some collision-resistant function (future proof), and then publish the text that matches the hash later. For this, you can just tweet it, or write it into a HN comment. $2a$12$0qd0ztFAO5XAjQ.HRDMxjeS3n6tsemeHfWfWO0MIBR0mwFfmyp2RO
- elil17 4y agoActually there is no where left in the world where this is the case. USA was the last country to use first to invent and we switched away in the mid 2000s
- vjaswal 4y agoAs another commenter noted, there's a general internet standard defined already for cryptographically timestamping and signing digital artifacts, like JARs, PDFs, dotNet assemblies, and many others. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3161 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3161 Many large certificate issuing orgs run timestamping authority servers. Tools like Java jarsigner, Adobe Acrobat, and many other tools are designed to work with them. Search for "rfc3161".
- layer8 4y agoI’d like to add that one should be aware that such timestamps are only valid until the TSA certificate expires (or is revoked). To prolong the validity, you need to add another timestamp on top, using a newer certificate, to prove that the first timestamp was created before its certificate expired/was revoked. This is a recursive process. If the TSA renews its certificate every N years, it makes sense to accordingly re-timestamp every N years to keep the original timestamp valid. To guard against the case of an untimely revocation, you may want to timestamp with multiple TSAs each time.
- smileybarry 4y agoThat's not really the case -- at least on Windows, timestamp signatures persist past the timestamping certificate's validity, it's their whole point. I just looked for something signed on my PC to find that Office 2019 installations were signed & timestamped on 2019-12-01 by Microsoft with both certs (code-signing and timestamping) valid 2019-2020. The signature & timestamp remain valid.
- layer8 4y agoIt may be the case that Windows behaves that way, but it means that if the signature and timestamp were fraudulently created after the fact, enabled by a key compromise or an algorithm compromise, Windows would incorrectly treat them as valid although they aren’t.
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- Trufa 4y agoThe only thing I don't get, and forgive me if it's a dumb question, what's the difference with say sending yourself an email/making a github repo/entry/any timestamped note?
- madeofpalk 4y agoThey can be faked. This, supposedly, cannot.
- lichtenberger 4y agoAs far as I understand there's also Zeitgitter[1], to provide similar proof. [1] https://github.com/zeitgitter/zeitgitterd https://github.com/zeitgitter/zeitgitterd
- transpa-regency 4y agoZeitgitter goes even further: The goal is to create a web of distributed timestampers, holding each other accountable. A blockchain without the need for wasting energy or money. https://netfuture.ch/2022/02/git-pgp-blockchain-comparison/ https://netfuture.ch/2022/02/git-pgp-blockchain-comparison/