ProveData

Cryptographic solution for confirmation of data authenticity.

Problem 

Fraud has been a staple of human societies throughout the ages. With the advent of science, fraud has also appeared regularly in scientific endeavours, from fabricated archaeology to false evidence on medical treatments that actually cause harm to patients and most recently, room-temperature superconductors. More importantly, there is currently an increasing drive towards quantitative evidence-based approaches to policy, policy-making and regulatory actions, which are all directly dependent on the reliability and authenticity of the big data on which they rely.

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of highly visible proven cases of fraud, damaging public and private trust in a wide range of institutions, from (previously reputable) academic and research ones to public bodies responsible for industry oversight and national and global corporations on which most of our current safety and well-being rest.

At the heart of all the issues identified above lies the authenticity of the data on the basis of which various claims are made. Guaranteeing this authenticity and that the data were gathered in a genuine fashion, as opposed to being forged by human or non-human (machine) actors, is the goal of ProveData.

Solution

One can easily verify whether a measurement was actually performed (and the results saved on local disk) on a specific device at a given time by generating a carefully constructed, unique cryptographic fingerprint of this operation. This fingerprint would be unique to each operation and generates a minimal amount of information that contains all the necessary parts to guarantee the authenticity of the file in perpetuity. Most importantly, the data never leaves the user’s local machine and does not get shared with us, so users will always remain the sole owners of copies of their data until they decide to share them.