Integrity and Authenticity for Digital Long-term Preservation in Irods Grid Infrastructure

Digital resources and documents have become part of our culture as many cultural and intellectual goods are “born-digital” – existing only in digital form. Therefore digital long-term preservation is sustaining our cultural heritage for the future. Because of its importance digital preservation is addressed by several national and international projects like the German NESTOR project [12], the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program [11], the IETF LTANS group ([21], [22]) and the EU FP7 SHAMAN Integrated Project [18]. Preserved resources and goods are only useful if their integrity and authenticity can be proven at any time. Although usually not made with the explicit intention to ensure integrity and authenticity in mind, in most cases both can be proven nevertheless for non-digital entities by their inherent characteristics. By their very nature, this is not the case for digital entities. Digital preservation must also ensure the integrity and authenticity of the entire preservation environment. This further imposes issues regarding the objective of digital long term preservation for at least 100 years in combination with the fast-paced developments in information technology. Many means of security used today become useless or even long forgotten in 100 years. For ensuring integrity and authenticity often electronic signatures are used and have been proposed for usage in digital preservation as in [17]. But digital signatures do not provide tamper protection or protect the integrity of data; they merely verify data integrity [3]. Although the obsolescence problem of digital signatures can be countered by a renewal of the signature, the