time stamping service (again)

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My PGP based time stamping service is back online.  I took it 
down a while ago thinking the folks at notary.com (Digital 
Time-Stamp, Inc.) were going to release their commercial 
time stamping product soon (it uses a more elegant protocol that
doesn't require trust in the time stamper, but the algorithm
is patented).  But I haven't heard anything from them 
in a while.

Anyway, it is now running as the following procmail recipe:

:0 w
* ^Subject: Time Stamp This Mail
{
PGPPASS=whateveryourpassphraseis
:0 c w
| (lockfile timestamp.lock ; pgp -fast +batchmode +force +verbose=0 \
+clearsig=off) > timestamp.out
 
:0 a h
| (formail -r -i 'Subject: Time Stamp Output';cat timestamp.out) | \
($SENDMAIL -t ;rm -f timestamp.lock)
}

To use it, just send whatever you need time stamped to me with 
the subject "time stamp this mail".

BTW, can a procmail expert explain to me why the locallockfile 
mechanism doesn't work with this recipe?  If I use :0 w : as 
the first line, procmail will happily ignore the locallockfile 
flag and proceed to munge up timestamp.out, so I have to do 
the filelocking manually.

Wei Dai


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| Anyway, it is now running as the following procmail recipe:
| 
| :0 w
| * ^Subject: Time Stamp This Mail
| {
| PGPPASS=whateveryourpassphraseis
| :0 c w
| | (lockfile timestamp.lock ; pgp -fast +batchmode +force +verbose=0 \
| +clearsig=off) > timestamp.out
|  
| :0 a h
| | (formail -r -i 'Subject: Time Stamp Output';cat timestamp.out) | \
| ($SENDMAIL -t ;rm -f timestamp.lock)
| }
| 
| To use it, just send whatever you need time stamped to me with 
| the subject "time stamp this mail".
| 
| BTW, can a procmail expert explain to me why the locallockfile 
| mechanism doesn't work with this recipe?  If I use :0 w : as 
| the first line, procmail will happily ignore the locallockfile 
| flag and proceed to munge up timestamp.out, so I have to do 
| the filelocking manually.

	You need a lockfile on the :0 cw line, not on the :0 w .

:0 cw:
| pgp -fast +batchmode +force +verbose=0 +clearsig=off > timestamp.out

> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> My PGP based time stamping service is back online.  I took it 
> down a while ago thinking the folks at notary.com (Digital 
> Time-Stamp, Inc.) were going to release their commercial 
...

This is elegant and great...

Why don't we add to the todo list the following:

Let's package up a number of the self-contained services, code, etc.
into a bundle that can be installed all at once (say on a Linux
system :-) ) and call it the 'CypherStation' release.

We can try to reach a concensus for standard service naming/access
methods and create a federation of these things.

It should have minimize bandwidth, minimize cpu, minimize storage
levels of service to allow different levels of users to have
different possible impact on the machine.  (Ie. : local, paying,
regional, unknown, domain, etc.)

I know that those of us running Internet services would devote
a little of our imaginary free time.

We could have a string to identify available services and versions:
CypherStation/.01/Serv:RTAmAh1.3  Where each service could have 
versions that differed from the release.

Just some raw thought.

sdw
-- 
Stephen D. Williams    25Feb1965 VW,OH      sdw@lig.net http://www.lig.net/sdw
Senior Consultant      510.503.9227 CA Page 513.496.5223 OH Page BA Aug94-Dec95
OO R&D AI:NN/ES crypto     By Buggy: 2464 Rosina Dr., Miamisburg, OH 45342-6430
Firewalls/WWW servers ICBM: 39 38 34N 84 17 12W home, 37 58 41N 122 01 48W work
Pres.: Concinnous Consulting,Inc.;SDW Systems;Local Internet Gateway Co.29Nov94

From: sdw@lig.net (Stephen D. Williams)

   It should have minimize bandwidth, minimize cpu, minimize storage
   levels of service to allow different levels of users to have
   different possible impact on the machine.  (Ie. : local, paying,
   regional, unknown, domain, etc.)

This is the area of policy, for which there are no general purpose
solutions that I know of.  I see a need for a general purpose module
that would accept authorization requests from various end-user
services (remailing, timestamping, storage, etc.) and return yes or
no.  If money is part of the policy, this is the place to implement
it.

That said, I don't think the lack of a policy engine prevents a
cypherware distribution from happening.

Eric