Design and Implementation of a RFC3161-Enhanced 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 designed and implemented a RFC3161-compliant trusted time-stamping service (TTS) over the Internet. Software for the TTS server (TSA) was implemented on the Linux platform using Gnu’s C compiler while the TSA client software was implemented on the Windows platform using Borland’s C++Builder tool. Both TSA server and TTS client is equipped with an IC card reader and an off-theshelf smart card to strengthen security protection of TTS. For our TTS server, an IC card is used to store private key of the server. On the other hand, IC cards of TTS clients is used to provide user authentication during TTS request and provides TTS server protection against possible denial of service (DoS) attacks that might be deployed by opponents.