Guardtime’s new service has several advantages over current offerings on the market, including scalability, ease-of-use, long-term and independent validity. With KSI timestamping, government and regulated industries can a) deploy an accredited timestamping service that does not require long-term key management  and b) easily upgrade complex legacy PKI based timestamping services to an indefinite validity "once and done" lightweight service. 

Almost all governments are exploring the use of blockchain/DLT for the purposes of data integrity - providing a "single source of truth" for government data and processes. Guardtime offers an alternative - one that delivers all the decentralization benefits of public blockchains, reduces the cost and governance complexity of setting up private DLT instances and is delivered as an accredited service that is legally sound across all EU member states.

For regulated entities who have been struggling to meet compliance requirements with traditional PKI based timestamping, this new service represents a quantum leap in ease of use. The service scales to millions of timestamps per second, which can be verified independently of Guardtime or any third-party service provider. Most significantly, the timestamps are valid indefinitely and are immune to attacks from quantum computers. This is in contrast to current timestamping technologies, which cannot scale to the volumes needed for cloud and edge computing and suffer from numerous security, reliability and longevity issues.

Guardtime’s CEO Mike Gault explained:

“In the aftermath of Coronavirus, governments and essential services are doubling down on their customer-facing and back-office digitization. Guardtime can help - with a highly scalable digital trust technology. With e-IDAS certification, KSI Blockchain timestamping becomes the best option for governments and critical services to ensure that data is trustworthy, reliable and protected. We have the only offering on the market that can scale to cover AI, 5G, cloud and edge computing.”

Siim Sikkut, Government CIO of Estonia, commented on the importance of KSI Blockchain to a country that is widely considered the world’s leading digital nation:

“KSI Blockchain has guaranteed the integrity and auditability of Estonian data and e-government systems since 2012. Scalable and future-proof digital integrity is crucial to the trustworthiness of any ambition digital transformation.”

KSI Blockchain timestamping is based on Guardtime’s enterprise-grade KSI Blockchain. KSI Blockchain was first used by the Government of Estonia to secure its critical health, justice and business data and has since been deployed by some the world’s most demanding customers, including numerous governments and leading Fortune 500 companies in telecom, aerospace, defense, energy, financial services and insurance. 

The EU regulation on e-ID and Trust Services came into force in 2016 and regulates the cross-border recognition of electronic identities, signatures, certificates and trust services. 

For more information, see guardtime.com/timestamping