Amber

Amber is an in-development utility for creating secure timestamps. A secure timestamp is a digital artifact that proves that texts from a corpus existed at a particular date (and therefore could not have been created after that date). This may be valuable in the future if new, hard-to-detect methods of altering or forging digital texts are invented, because the existence of such methods would cast doubt on the authenticity of genuine digital texts. Proving that a document existed before the forgery methods were created would help to prove the document’s authenticity.

The goal of this project is to create an easy-to-use, free, open-source software tool that creates secure timestamps, and to timestamp as much of humanity’s digital historical record as possible in the next several years.

Learn More

This overview explains why timestamping data is urgently necessary, how we can do it with existing, well-tested, low-cost computer science techniques, and how you can help.

Project Status

To date, I have made several secure timestamps of culturally- and historically-relevant corpuses (see below).

Amber is an open-source timestamping utility currently in beta. It can be used to create secure timestamps but has not been completely tested and probably still has some bugs. I will soon release a prototype GUI wrapper to make it easier to use.

I am actively looking for collaborators, in particular people who maintain digital archives or do research into archival methods. If you are interested in working with me or learning more, send me an email and make sure to include “Amber” in the email subject.

Existing Timestamps