Seal

Security and privacy

timestamping

SHOW HN2022

113points
65comments
#552of 2,570 in 2022
Top 22%of 2022 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

3 positive, 22 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 11 critical, out of 36 comments about the project. Thread score -0.13.

Idea: 3 for, 11 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Good concept and hack

    From 3 comments
    • I like this concept! Good luck with this.
      jschveibinz on HN
    • I love these sorts of hacks. In fact I did something similar with a project called rget[1] two thoughts: 1. My project got politely asked to not use the ct log and lets encrypt…
      philips on HN
    • This is a good hack, even with some very light abuse (once per 12 hours) of CT logs. I don't see the need to build new tech though. It should be trivial to build a CRUD layer…
      anilgulecha on HN

Objections

  • Abuses Certificate Transparency logs

    From 2 comments
    • Abusing CT log is unethical. For practical purposes DKIM signatures in emails would do the trick. Write an email to yourself, or to someone you trust, its DKIM will include the…
      sam_lowry_ on HN
    • A bunch of comments below indicated that this is technically an abuse of the CT logs. Feel free to use Sigstore instead for this, it's basically the same architecture as CT logs…
      dlor on HN
  • Existing timestamping standards and services already exist (RFC 3161, OpenTimestamps, Sigstore)

    From 4 comments
    • As another commenter noted, there's a general internet standard defined already for cryptographically timestamping and signing digital artifacts, like JARs, PDFs, dotNet…
      vjaswal on HN
    • Alternatively, every large CA maintains a public TSA server (time-stamping authority), because it's an integral part of the code signing framework. These are meant for high…
      eps on HN
    • There's also https://opentimestamps.org/ for timestamping into the bitcoin blockchain using a 'calendar aggregation' concept. Clients get back a merkle tree of hashes that can be…
      kanzure on HN
    • A bunch of comments below indicated that this is technically an abuse of the CT logs. Feel free to use Sigstore instead for this, it's basically the same architecture as CT logs…
      dlor on HN
  • Unclear value proposition beyond patents, which have moved to first-to-file

    From 3 comments
    • I'm not sure what the value proposition is here. Is the idea that you want to use this later to tell others you had the idea first, or to protect your IP? If so, I could…
      headsoup on HN
    • Outside of patents, which is already a thing, with a very large legal framework around it. Why is that important?
      onethought on HN
    • Under Obama, the America invents acts switched patent IP ownership to first to file. Inventing something first no longer matters in patent law.
      geraldwhen on HN
  • Timestamps can be faked or the trust model is weak

    From 2 comments

Requests

  • Use Sigstore instead of CT logs

    From 2 comments
    • A bunch of comments below indicated that this is technically an abuse of the CT logs. Feel free to use Sigstore instead for this, it's basically the same architecture as CT logs…
      dlor on HN
    • I love these sorts of hacks. In fact I did something similar with a project called rget[1] two thoughts: 1. My project got politely asked to not use the ct log and lets encrypt…
      philips on HN

Questions

  • What is the use case and who would use it

    From 2 comments
    • Seems like an interesting problem, but I have zero background knowledge. Could you share who would use this and why?
      productceo on HN
    • The only thing I don't get, and forgive me if it's a dumb question, what's the difference with say sending yourself an email/making a github repo/entry/any timestamped note?
      Trufa on HN

Alternatives named

  • RFC 3161 timestamp authorities

    From 1 comment
    • As another commenter noted, there's a general internet standard defined already for cryptographically timestamping and signing digital artifacts, like JARs, PDFs, dotNet…
      vjaswal on HN
  • OpenTimestamps (Bitcoin)

    From 1 comment
    • There's also https://opentimestamps.org/ for timestamping into the bitcoin blockchain using a 'calendar aggregation' concept. Clients get back a merkle tree of hashes that can be…
      kanzure on HN
  • Sigstore

    From 1 comment
    • A bunch of comments below indicated that this is technically an abuse of the CT logs. Feel free to use Sigstore instead for this, it's basically the same architecture as CT logs…
      dlor on HN
  • Zeitgitter

    From 1 comment
    • As far as I understand there's also Zeitgitter[1], to provide similar proof. [1] https://github.com/zeitgitter/zeitgitterd
      lichtenberger on HN
  • Emailing yourself or posting hashes publicly

    From 2 comments
    • The only thing I don't get, and forgive me if it's a dumb question, what's the difference with say sending yourself an email/making a github repo/entry/any timestamped note?
      Trufa on HN
    • For anyone who’s interested in a quick and dirty way to do it, I just post the sha256 to Twitter/some public forum and reveal when I feel like it
      nstart on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/31637150)