Keyless Signatures' Infrastructure: How to Build Global Distributed Hash-Trees

Keyless Signatures Infrastructure KSI is a globally distributed system for providing time-stamping and server-supported digital signature services. Global per-second hash trees are created and their root hash values published. We discuss some service quality issues that arise in practical implementation of the service and present solutions for avoiding single points of failure and guaranteeing a service with reasonable and stable delay. Guardtime AS has been operating a KSI Infrastructure for 5 years. We summarize how the KSI Infrastructure is built, and the lessons learned during the operational period of the service.