A Digital Signature Signing Engine to Protect the Integrity of Digital Assets

IT security, data privacy and senior project courses at Brigham Young University (BYU) provided the instruction, opportunity, and challenge for university seniors to collaborate with faculty to develop a digital signature signing engine used to protect the integrity of digital assets. The need for a digital signature signing server arises due to the fact that the integrity of digital assets - images, video, audio, Web content, and documents - are under constant risk of being maliciously or intentionally modified, corrupted or "snatched" by attackers. Also, proof of origin and restoration of digital content to its original state frequently becomes an issue. The team of students selected a distributed model of multiple nodes of servers in order to meet user demands to control their respective asset environments; the team used open source software to implement the certification authority, time-date-service, scheduling, signing, verification, authentication, Web services and database functions; and the students learned how to integrate technically challenging components that they had individually evaluated in a laboratory setting, into a scalable and distributable digital signature signing engine. Two laboratories collaborated with the students and provided images of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Earth satellite images to be digitally signed using public key cryptography technology. Learning to interact with and meet the needs of the client in the usage of the solution completed the project's objective to give students a real life IT problem