Digital time stamping system based on open source technologies

A digital time stamping system (the BALTICTIME system) was developed by using the open source technologies and was adopted to meet the egovernmental applications, where legal and accountable time stamps are essential. All components of the BALTICTIME system were developed by using the open source software technologies LINUX-UBUNTU, OpenTSA, OpenSSL, MySQL and are designed to suit the hardware, which is common to the national time metrology laboratories. The main technological tasks of BALTICTIME are to develop the interface between national time standard authorities, keepers of the national coordinated time scales UTC(k), and time stamping authorities (TSAs); to develop the issued time stamps archiving system integral with UTC(k) time scale; as well as to develop security system based on interoperable certificate data base. Technical specifications will be assessed according to requirements of the international standards. Test results demonstrate the BALTICTIME system's ability to issue up to 10 accountable (archived) digital time stamps per second, which fulfills the needs of egovernment and ecommercial services. Calibration and testing procedures of time stamping units were developed.