Innovation

The technological innovation behind the GuardTime service answers the question “What properties would the ideal digital timestamping system have”:

• Independent verification, no requirement to trust GuardTime or any third party
  At any point in the future if you want to verify a timestamp you need your original data, the associated timestamp and an integrity code (either electronic or one published in newspapers, currently in the Financial Times). You have no exposure to the existence of GuardTime or any well kept secret or key. For a timestamping service to receive global adoption it is a critical requirement.
• Long term verification
  Without any cryptographic keys involved in the verification process the lifetime of the timestamp is limited only by the cryptographic lifetime of the used hash function (quantum computing won’t break it either).
• Scale
  The GuardTime Grid, i.e. a hierarchical distribution and aggregation grid  provides the integrity service. The service is infinitely scalable: to be able to issue more timestamps only more gateways have to be added to the Grid, yet the load on the core servers does not increase. There is no bottleneck in the system.
• High Availability
  With no single point of failure in the system (think hierarchical and distributed, similar in structure to DNS) and multiple concurrent communication channels it is designed for extremely high availability
• Provable Security
  GuardTime’s system is the only known provably secure timestamping system. That means that the security properties of the timestamp can be mathematically derived from the properties of the used hash function. For the timestamp to be secure the hash functions used do not even have to be collision-resistant or even one-way.