Subject: RE: My objections to the submitted draft - company archive & long -term archive - comment to libor & Aleksej

From: Tobias Gondrom <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 17:37:35 +0100

Libor and Aleksej,

> > > So far we faced an
> > > approach of how to define an interaction with an archive and
> > > what is critically missing in the next 
> > > step are archival data structures. TAS might always operate as a stand

> > > alone entity, mainly dealing with archival complementary data (not 
> > > archived documents!!). And most importantly: why do we need data 
> > > structures? To assure transparency and existence of an archive over 
> > > undefined period of time. 

As you can see at the milestones the data structures are planned for this
spring - we are actually working on the initial draft to release it during
the next days.

> > > And finally, archivists play their general role 
> > > in archiving records, but does a stand alone company need an
archivist? 
> > > Not really. Although laws dictates the archiving time of a document, a

> > > closet does perform more than perfect. So, before we are discussing 
> > > further the main question remains: what is the purpose of the archive
we 
> > > are trying to define?
> > 
> > We need to realize that the two archiving worlds exists:
> > - stand-alone company archive - it does not need archivists,
> > do not archive documents for more than 20years and it is 
> > sufficient for it to either create long term signatures or 
> > simply to use some existing commercial archiving product 

Don't agree. Even or maybe especially on this scale the need for long-term
(maybe even only 20 years) is not satisfied by long term signatures (I
assume these should be signatures with extra-long keys ?). You alsways still
depend on the algorithm used at signing time without possibility of
extension. So for companies it is mission critical to be able to "renew the
signatures" with timestamps. 

Second is: Commercial archiving products today rely on the Write-only
functionality of some media when they try something like that. This way is
based on some law interpretation that was developed some years ago when TSAs
were not available. 
It is very problematic as you have to trust the company archive in some way
that the data media's are not manipulated and you encounter problems when
you have to migrate the data from an old media type e.g. CDs to something
more convenient like DVDs, etc.

> > - long-term archives. Each document of permanent value 
> > finally ends in some archive of this type. We already have 
> > such archives for paper documents, films, audio and video. 
> > LTANS (if I understood well) aims to create mechanisms for 
> > archiving of digitally signed documents.
> 
> Agree (see my previous post!). LTANS should give partial (or
> incremental) solutions to solve both problems (and not only 
> digitally signed documents)... A nice example to this 
> approach rfc3126 or XAdES.
> 

Agree so far that LTANS should solve both. 
Comment: As long as we keep the formats, i.e. the content of the stored data
unknown to the TAA the long term storage is basically solved for signed as
well as unsigned data.

Tobias