I've seen the term "notary" thrown around in software circles for at least 10 years. If you did a Google search 5 years ago for "digital notary" most of what you found would be for this software meaning of "digital notary", but now most of what you find would have to do with remote online notarization.
Here is a software project using this incorrect meaning of "digital notary":
https://github.com/janfilips/blockchain-notary
The concept of these things is that you apply a hashing algorithm to your (digital) document (also called a message digest). You publish the message digest. You be sure to keep the digital document for as long as it could possibly be needed. For example, I just took a picture of my most recent journal page. The message digest of the digital photo is de2e980b8a26da177fa726894b14329e (using the MD5 algorithm).
Lets say Bozo accuses me of backdating a notarization that my certificate says was done today, November 18, 2019, but Bozo claims I didn't do it until November 21. I go to this post, and show I was able to create the above message digest. I show them the picture of the journal, with the client's signature. That proves the journal entry existed on November 18, because that's when the forum post was made.
So these software "digital notaries" are a more organized way of recording and time-stamping the message digests that are submitted. You don't know what, if anything, these message digests mean, unless someone gives you the file the message digest was created from. |
