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by sp1rit 821 days ago
> Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge?

I feel like the best you can do is either to publish a cryptographically secure hash or to publish something encrypted and share the key/password when you want to reveal the secret.
3 comments
BoppreH 821 days ago
But publish it where, though? It has to be:

- Publicly accessible.

- Timestamped.

- Immutable (or at least with edits marked as such).

- Widely trusted (or too big to be bribed in small cases, e.g., Google).

- And keep those features for many years.

Twitter was surprisingly good at that in the past, but no more. Blockchains, as mentioned in other comments, give excellent immutability; but the field is such a minefield that I'd struggle to find a trustworthy blockchain explorer.

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0cf8612b2e1e 821 days ago
Publish a document hash in the newspaper classifieds. Media should still be getting permanently archived by National Archive or Internet Archive.
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fragmede 821 days ago
Why would you trust only one Blockchain explorer? You'd trust the blockchain by using several explorers, and by confirming that they all agree on the same value, to assuage any fears you have about any one particular blockchain explorer lying to you. Write your own, even, if your level of confidence needs to be that high.
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__jonas 821 days ago
It's funny given the context of this case that this would be one of the rare times when using a blockchain would have actually been useful
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rstuart4133 820 days ago
I'm repeating what I said above, but just send yourself an gmail with the hash in the Subject. Gmail will kindly timestamp it and provide a DKIM signature. Publish the mail headers gmail includes in the signature (which includes the timestamp and subject, but not the contents), the signature itself, and a link to hashed the document and you're done.
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mjg59 820 days ago
This is only true if Google never release old private keys for DKIM signatures, which various people have been campaigning for them to do in order to provide long-term deniability around DKIM-signed mails.
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rstuart4133 817 days ago
> This is only true if Google never release old private keys for DKIM signatures, which various people have been campaigning for them to do in order to provide long-term deniability around DKIM-signed mails.

I didn't know. Thanks for the heads up.

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OkayPhysicist 821 days ago
Take out a personal ad in a newspaper.
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nullc 821 days ago
> Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge?

Judges can be aided by expert reports.

And not all judges are non-technical.

The fact that you can defend your documents with timestamps is often enough: the other side won't challenge them knowing that they are likely to lose the challenge.

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upofadown 821 days ago
If you can prove the existence of the encrypted thing before some point in time than you could prove the existence of the unencrypted thing before some point in time.

There isn't any way to do this without one or more trusted third parties. Traditionally that would involve someone like a public notary or a lawyer.

I was amused to find that there is a service that cryptographically timestamps things over email via PGP that has been running since 1995:

* https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm

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