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Content archived on 2024-05-27

An OPEN source tEchnology for data certIfication Value-aDdEd serviCEs

Objective

With the emergence of legal environments concerning the recognition of electronic signatures and long-term validity of electronic documents evidence-creating and evidence-validating services operated by third parties are a proposed means to address the problem of technical support for long term authentic documents.
OpenEvidence produces technology for evidence creation and evidence validation in a context of electronic or dematerialised documents and activities, based on current and emerging technologies for digital signatures, key management, time stamping, archiving and notary systems and standardised document formats. In this context, evidence should be understood as a document certified by some authority that guarantees the data it contains. The authenticity of the evidence must be easily verifiable, as well as when it is obtained and, often, long time later by any relying party. For example, a possible necessary but not always sufficient means to for validation of an evidence is that it needs to be signed and time-stamped.
The technology integrated by the project can be used as basic building blocks to support such services as non-repudiation of electronic business transactions or services to ensure property right protection (often coined as electronic notary services) or as part of e Administration infrastructures such as IDA. All software will be available under an open source licence. At least, a licence with equivalent conditions as in the OPENSSL licence will be used.

Work description:
OpenEvidence integrates technology for evidence creation and evidence validation in a context of electronic or dematerialised documents and activities as an open source development. It integrates existing complementary technologies from three participants for time stamping, archiving, signature validation, and data validation and certification. A state of the art report and a user requirement analysis concerning evidence creation systems is produced in order to determine the technical and organisational boundaries for the project. Existing software from three participants using implementations of complementary standards and protocols are integrated and enhanced. Pilot demonstration services and a user testbed are used to evaluate and assess the technology regarding aspects of functionality, security and legal conformance. The software will be made available in the public domain. Experiences from the project development and the test bed will be contributed to standardisation activities. The software and the test bed services will be used to promote trusted third party services supporting dematerialisation of documents.
The software developed concerns several environments. Clients interfaces are used to interface services and to also combine evidences with documents, for example, by using attributes in documents formatted according the Cryptographic Message Syntax.
The server implementation consists of more than just the protocol engines. An important part of the project is devoted to create a secure and normalised journal format of activities (the list of created events) which not only allows external auditing, but also simplifies several scenarios of cessation and transfer of activities.

Milestones:
M2.1 State of the art and user requirements report (month 3);
M5.1 Availability of early demonstrator (month 3);
M3.2 Initial Technical Architecture for Open evidence and TTP service definitions (month 6);
M4.1 Availability of software and documentation (from month 6 on);
M5 Testbed Overview Documentation (month 12);
M7 Initial Dissemination Report (month 12);
M5.2 Open Evidence final version, development platform and process (month 24).

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

EDELWEB
EU contribution
No data
Address
15 QUAI DE DION BOUTON
92800 PUTEAUX
France

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Total cost
No data

Participants (3)