On November 27th 2024, Namirial participated in the Preserve EU initiative on Digital Preservation.
The event brought together the most important players in the market, including several international Qualified Trust Service Providers and Experts that shared key insights on preserving digital trust and safeguarding signatures. Among the contributors was Namirial, represented by its CTO, Davide Coletto.
The presentations showcased different approaches, but each contribution converged towards a common goal: ensuring the necessary evidence for digital preservation.
Namirial’s participation underscored its position as a leader in trust services, with over a decade of experience as a qualified preserver, certification authority, and time-stamping authority.
This article delves into the key themes discussed during the initiative, highlighting the convergence of strategies for digital preservation, the role of trust service providers, and the collaborative effort to establish common standards across the European Union.
Preserving Digital Trust in a Fragmented Landscape
Digital transformation has revolutionized how individuals, businesses, and governments operate. However, it has also created an urgent need for robust systems that can preserve digital evidence over time. From legally binding contracts to eInvoices, the reliance on digital signatures and documents demands solutions that guarantee their immutability, authenticity, and accessibility decades into the future.
The Preserve EU initiative serves as a platform to tackle these challenges. Participants, including Qualified Trust Service Providers (QTSPs), industry leaders, and regulatory bodies, presented different approaches to preserving digital trust. Despite diverse methodologies, a shared objective emerged: ensuring that the evidence needed for digital preservation is not only sufficient but also standardized across jurisdictions.
Namirial, with its extensive experience managing over 5 billion documents, emphasized the critical role of the document in digital preservation.
As Davide Coletto articulated, clients require systems in which the central element is the document, preserved ensuring immutability, integrity, authenticity, and readability over time, also guaranteeing the validity of signatures with a demonstrable validation process.
Core Principles of Digital Preservation
1. Immutability
The cornerstone of digital preservation is ensuring that documents remain unchanged from their original state. This is achieved through robust cryptographic techniques, such as hashing, which generates unique digital fingerprints for each file. Any alteration would invalidate the hash, making tampering immediately detectable.
2. Integrity
Beyond immutability, integrity involves maintaining the internal consistency of a document, ensuring that it retains its intended structure and content throughout its lifecycle.
3. Authenticity
A preserved document must retain evidence of its origin and the entities that created or signed it. Digital signatures play a vital role here, offering proof of authenticity that remains verifiable even years after the signature was applied.
4. Readability
Technology evolves rapidly, and file formats that are common today may become obsolete tomorrow. A preservation system must ensure that documents remain accessible and readable over time, regardless of technological changes.
The OAIS Model and Chain of Evidence
Namirial’s preservation system is built on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model, a widely recognized framework for digital preservation. This model ensures the chain of evidence by:
• Creating Digital Fingerprints (HASH): These cryptographic tools serve as a guarantee of the document’s immutability and integrity.
• Enabling Evidence Exhibition: The system provides mechanisms to display preserved documents along with the necessary evidence to validate their authenticity and integrity.
The OAIS model is particularly valuable for legal and regulatory purposes, as it allows organizations to demonstrate compliance with preservation requirements. Namirial’s adoption of this model reflects its commitment to providing systems that are both technically robust and aligned with international best practices.
Towards Common Standards: The Vision of the Working Group
One of the key outcomes of the Preserve EU initiative was the recognition of the need for common standards. These standards would facilitate the adoption of digital preservation systems across different countries, creating a unified framework that benefits both organizations and citizens. By simplifying cross-border processes, common standards would enable:
• Interoperability: Ensuring that digital preservation systems can seamlessly exchange information across jurisdictions.
• Scalability: Allowing organizations to implement preservation solutions that are compatible with multiple regulatory environments.
• Ease of Use: Simplifying the user experience for both businesses and citizens.
Namirial’s participation in this working group reflects its proactive approach to shaping the future of digital preservation. By leveraging its expertise, the company aims to contribute to the development of standards that address current challenges while anticipating future needs.
Shaping the Future of Digital Preservation
The Preserve EU initiative underscored the importance of collaboration in addressing the challenges of digital preservation. By bringing together QTSPs, industry experts, and regulators, the initiative paved the way for a unified approach to preserving digital trust.
Namirial’s contributions, rooted in over a decade of experience, highlighted the critical role of trust services in safeguarding the integrity and authenticity of digital records. As the working group moves forward in defining common standards, Namirial is well-positioned to play a leading role in shaping the future of digital preservation.
In a world increasingly reliant on digital records, ensuring their longevity and reliability is not just a technical challenge—it is a fundamental requirement for preserving trust in the digital age. The work of the Preserve EU initiative represents a significant step toward achieving this goal, and Namirial’s expertise will undoubtedly be instrumental in realizing the vision of a more connected, transparent, and trustworthy digital future.