Fact Registration Concept (TH5A)

Session Topic: Fact Registration Concept (TH5A)

Convener: Nadya Onishchenko

Notes-taker(s): Nadya Onishchenko

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered: 

Authentication, authenticity of electronic documents,  factographic significance, Facton.

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Any developed electronic communication system should offer an efficient medium for authenticity proof of stored documents and data processing protocols. Nowadays, there is no effective system to proof the authenticity of electronic documents. Here is the example. Some photo with a strange content appeared in the Internet. Usually the audience tends to break into two parts. The first vehemently asserts that the piece in question is a forgery; others have no doubts that the story was a true one. But, nowadays the both sides have virtually no authenticity verification mechanisms.

The only way to prove the authenticity of an electronic document is to obtain a third party certification.

We have to add independent depositaries into electronic environment. They have to witness current events, remember them and confirm them, when necessary. Entering a document into the system of electronic communications is an event which must be registered and certified. The event is registered by an acknowledgment.

The certifying attributes are as follows:
 * the time of the document’s appearance in the electronic communication system;
 * data format for the human readable content playback of the electronic document;
 * an operator - a source that introduces the document into the electronic communication system;
 * a check code that excludes the possibility of illegitimate content modification during the transfer and storage processes (type MD5);
 * an additional operator selected data pertaining to the situation.

The existence of certain verification level in an electronic document we shall call the ‘factographic significance’. Legal significance is a particular case of factographic significance. The acknowledgment is dispatched to several depositaries. The document comes to provider.

A new term: facton is a quantum, an elementary particle of the factographic significance. It is the scheme according to which the electronic communication system should provide a third party certification for the electronic document authenticity, while maintaining the confidentiality of the document.

When the data unit verification is needed, the corresponding factons are requested from the independent depositories, the correspondence of the data unit to the control code is checked and if no contradictions are found, there is no reason to doubt the data unit authenticity. The operation is no more complicated than the debit card pin code verification in the ATM. Providers, audit companies, banks, courts and government agencies can act as facton depositories. The possibility of the collusion among these institutions can be excluded because only the sending source has the addresses of depositories where the facton copies have been sent.

The described mechanism of facton generation and storage seems to be the most natural and economical, as it provides a secure recording of communication history and excludes any possibility of its falsification.

The system of the independent depositaries where the subscribers can store factons as well as the documents represents a natural step towards the development of the electronic communication logic in the era of cloud technologies.

The proposed method assures registration of factographic significance of the documents, as a universal systemic feature of media environment.

It may serve as a solid platform for financial and business communications, for copyright protection, verification of video data authenticity – all the important factors of modern social life.

Facton is a victory over deception, fraud, disinformation. http://www.slideshare.net/Nadya_0802/iiw13-2