Surety operates a third-party "digital notary" service, AbsoluteProof®, that enables our customers to protect the integrity and independently verify and prove ownership and authenticity of their electronic records, files or any digital content throughout their chain of custody.
How "Digital Notary" AbsoluteProof® Protects Data Integrity
Our AbsoluteProof® service is an Internet-based application that connects seamlessly with enterprise network servers, content management systems, desktops and laptops, scanning devices, records and document management systems, email servers and other customized applications, like electronic lab notebooks (ELN) and any other digital media management system. With this "digital notarization" approach, Surety’s AbsoluteProof® Data Integrity Protection service is the easiest, most affordable and effective form of legally-defensible intellectual property insurance you can get from an "electronic notary" today.
AbsoluteProof® Sealing and Validating Process
During content “sealing,” the customer’s records or files never leave the customer’s premise.
Any third party can validate a “sealed” record or file easily by using the free, downloadable AbsoluteProof® Viewer.
Hash-Chain Linking and Widely-Witnessed Process: Long-term Integrity Protection
Surety Integrity Seals provide long-term integrity protection and have the evidentiary quality to stand up under the most intense scrutiny. We use our own patented technique called "hash-chain linking" where the binding of a time value to an electronic record is accomplished by combining and hashing the file and time value and then linking the results into Surety's continuous hash chain. The integrity of the chain itself is protected and auditable through our widely-witnessed process, where once a week we publish the hash-chain’s integrity value in the Public Notices section of the New York Times. This enables a third party to validate a Seal without placing any trust on another party's people, processes, or systems, including Surety.
This anchors the integrity of the Seal and as a result, you are guaranteed future verifiability and compelling evidence of record or file integrity.
See diagram below.
Surety’s patented hash-chain-linking methodology enables scalability and widely-witnessed proof of authenticity.
The validation process relies only on the data in the Seal, the published value in the New York Times, and the application of standard, widely-analyzed, and widely-trusted secure hash algorithms (SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160). It is this independence that gives Surety Integrity Seals their outstanding evidentiary quality to prove ownership, similar to an "electronic notary."
Surety’s open, Widely-Witnessed process makes it impossible for anyone— including Surety— to backdate time stamps or validate electronic records that were not exact copies of the originals.