Authenticity, Integrity and Proof-of-Existence for Long-Term Archiving: a Survey

Electronic archives are increasingly being used to store information that needs to be available for a long time such as land register information and medical records. In order for the data in such archives to remain useful, their integrity and authenticity must be protected over their entire life span. Also, in many cases it must be possible to prove that the data existed at a certain point in time. In this paper we survey solutions that provide long-term integrity, authenticity, and proof of existence of archived data. We analyze which trust assumptions they require and compare their efficiency. Based on our analysis, we discuss open problems and promising research directions.