[Cryptography] Best internet crypto clock

Arnold Reinhold agr at me.com
Tue Oct 7 19:41:37 EDT 2014


On Oct 7, 2014, at 3:02 PM, Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl> wrote:

> 2014-10-07 16:21 GMT+02:00 Arnold Reinhold <agr at me.com>:
> I would envision including a good quality internal clock, set at time of manufacture and non alterable. (When the clock battery dies, the camera is toast.) The camera would periodically or on command output a signed certificate containing the current reading of its internal click and maybe an external nonce like the NIST beacon, which might then be sent to a time stamping service, creating a record of internal clock drift over time.. The camera might store a correction factor, so it could output a UTC time, but the internal clock would be included in any certificate as well.
> 
> It would seem that a camera like this would be useful in a variety of applications (besides kidnapping) to create legally provable documents. Assuming it had a video mode, it could be used as a notary, recording a person's spoken acceptance of contract, or witnessing his handwritten signature on a document. Of course one would still have to trust the manufacturer.
> 
> Just put it in the SD card, not the camera. Lot cheaper to replace. Of course, that doesn't mean you trust the contents, just that the image existed at some point in time (which is pretty good!). Then you could have additional certificates from the camera, if the HSM self-destructs there'll be no more certificates. If I can show such a file + certificate, then it means a valid camera shot that specific image, just not at what time specifically.

Having the camera and a cock inside the module cuts out all video editing techniques. The camera can attest when the entire optical image was captured. I’d go further and include a gyro/accelerometer package so a panorama could be captured with attestation that the camera was actually turned, rather than presented with a moving image. 

> 
> The failure is that there's more than the eye can see.. An unedited video of a fake moonlanding is still a fake moonlanding, even if it looked real. For that matter, something faked at the same time as when something was supposed to happen still looks real anyhow! So, I guess the in-SD-card option seems better. It'd be cool to have for other files too, claiming prior art over an idea that someone's patenting because of a sketch or a dribble in your (digital) notebook? Pretty cool! Preserves privacy and solves conflicts in a really positive way. It would also really kill overly broad patents, because everyone has probably thought about it at some point :). You can even sell your notebook's page-with-similar-enough-note to a party that wants to invalidate a patent! That'd really turn things upside down and around again.

INAPL, but my understanding is that the US is going to a first-to-file patent priority system, a has much of the rest of the world already, so what ideas you had when only matters if you publish them. An online, timestamped, well indexed patent disclosure journal where people could post all their clever ideals as fast as they get them would be easy enough to implement. A mechanism for others to add comments that clarified and extended your ideas (much like these threads) would help prevent trolls patenting the gaps in your ideas.  A small fee could keep down spam. Existing crypto and time-stamping services should suffice for authentication. 


Arnold Reinhold



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