On the Design and Implementation of a Secure Time-Stamping Service

As the Internet grows in scale almost every year, security measures are expected to become all the more important on the Internet. A Time-stamping authority (TSA) is a trusted authority which provides a proof that a datum existed before a particular time. In this research, we implemented a RFC-3161 compliant time-stamping service over the Internet. The TSA server software was implemented on Linux platform using C language while the TSA client software was implemented on Windows platform using C++Builder tool. Our TSA server is also equipped with an USB reader and an off-the-shelf smart card to store and retrieve private key of the TSA.

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