GNUMed Utility Collection

GNotary is a combination of a secure backup program and a digital notary service. It consists of a client part and a server part.

26.11.2001: GNotary source code now available from CVS savannah.gnu.org

24.09.2001: GNotary client available for download CAVE: better get the newest source code from CVS

24.06.2001: GNOTARY IS OPERATIONAL IN BETA TEST

1. Why would I need such a service?

• Without a digital notary service, it is impossible to prove integrity and authenticity of your electronic health records.

2. How does it work?

• There are several methods of proving data integrity. We do it by countersigning a digital signature of your document and optionally storing the signature/countersignature offsite, where you have no access.

3. When will it be available?

• GNotary is free software written by unpaid volunteers. We develop at our own pace, for our own needs. If you need it sooner, you can always hire a software developer to help us.

4. What will it cost?

• Nothing. GNotary is free software, no strings attached.

5. What can I do until it becomes available?

• Use freely available command line tools.

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The GNotary client

The GNotary client is a Python script providing a graphical user interface to the common tasks of selecting files for a backup, calculating strong hashes for each file, and storing files in a compressed ZIP archive file. By pressing a single button, the hashes of the selected files are calculated and sent to one or more notary servers.

It should run on any platform supporting Python and the wxPython toolkit. I have tested it only on Gnu/Linux and Windows.

At present I am busy with other projects, I would welcome if somebody would continue development and biuld some binaries (built with py2exe) for download. However, the software already works as it is; it just would benefit from additional functionality and some polishing.

At present, I am using the MD5 algorithm. However, the final version should use the more trustworthy RIPEMD-160 algorithm.

CAVE: This software is early beta stage. Although the author already uses it daily, it might still be full of bugs and certainly misses some features. For all we know, it might simply blow your computer apart

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The GNotary server

The "server" is a simple python script which grabs incoming mail that matches a filter condition, pipes this mail through the signing process of the GNU privacy guard, retains a copy of the signed message, and sends the signed message back to the sender.

In the future, all notary servers will exchange message digests of their own certificate log mutually (and get them mutually certified), thus creating a virtually unbreakable chain of evidence (tampering with a single mail certificate on a single server would invalidate all other log certificates in an auditable and traceable way).

A second server, and email autoresponder, is set up to send the public key of the notary service on request.

An operational server which you might try is:

gnotary@gnumed.net

Simply write an email containing the message digest or whatever yoiu need notarized, and make sure the subject line contains

gnotarize

and nothing else

To request thepublic key, write an email to

keyserver@gnumed.net

with the subject line containing

gnotary-public-key