The computer chip has permeated just about every aspect of modern culture, from the way we educate our children to the way we manage our finances. But as the world enters the long-promised Silicon Age, a new danger looms on the horizon: computer fraud and forgery. Unlike paper documents, on which forensic scientists can easily spot the telltale signs of manipulation, digital documents are notoriously easy to fake.
Although we’ve yet to experience the first digital Watergate, the ease with which hackers can tamper with computer-generated documents, legal records, financial transfers, and digitized photography has security experts worried. Millions of people have personal computers and, consequently, access to the myriad desktop-publishing and image-retouching programs that make it easy to manipulate bits of digital information. In a few short minutes, a forger could remove one person from a group meeting or change the results of an AIDS test, and nobody would be the wiser.
Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta are researchers at Bellcore, the joint research and engineering arm of the nation’s regional telephone companies. The threat of foul play prompted the two to investigate methods of securing the integrity of electronic documents. The system they created, dubbed the Digital Time-Stamp, is the first practical and foolproof electronic document security system.
