SecureNTP DES for Cities™  and the vLEO™ Eval­u­a­tion Program

As a part of Certichron’s new vLEO work­ing group efforts Cer­tichron is pleased to announce the avail­abil­ity of DES for a 90 day trial period for Cities using secure time ser­vices as a new evi­dence anchor for the Law Enforce­ment and City Oper­a­tions ser­vices. 

SecureNTP for Cities program

SecureNTP for Cities profides a secure source of time for City IT Oper­a­tions which is prov­able. SecureNTP  for Cities pro­vides a City Man­ager with a secure source of time which is prov­able to the point of court admis­si­bil­ity. With this ser­vice the City Man­ager work­ing to pro­duce a court-​​admissible evi­dence work­flow will have the time-​​base trust anchor to prove the syn­chro­niza­tion of the local time ser­vice as well as any servers which peer­ing was setup for. 

SecureNTP with DES

Addi­tion­ally DES offers the City Man­ager the abil­ity to cre­ate their own Dig­i­tal Evi­dence Pol­icy and IT Prac­tice for its cre­ation in the form of NTP based content-​​timestamps. Most IT peo­ple are unaware that NTP has two optional pay­loads which can be used to carry addi­tional hashes which can be used to rep­re­sent events in time. Certichron’s SecureNTP DES does exactly this and allows for the time-​​stamping and archival stor­age through the Peer­ing Pro­gram com­po­nent of SecureNTP. 

DES pro­vides its adopters an unprece­dented Audit and Evi­dence Prac­tice Enablement

This capa­bil­ity allows a City Man­ager and IT Direc­tor to pro­vide a Time-​​stamping prac­tice which can be used like a Cash Reg­is­ter Receipt only one which can con­tain any num­ber of event or prac­tice types. The ser­vice is an audit design­ers dream because they can cre­ate third-​​party time­stamps which are prov­ably cre­ated through the use of the NIST(UTC) time stan­dard itself. No other time man­age­ment and evi­dence creation/​management process offers this level of capability.

DES for Cities is a new pro­gram to imple­ment new dig­i­tal evi­dence prac­tices atop exist­ing and emerg­ing city-​​operations work flows. This key prac­tice adds sup­port­ing value to exist­ing work flows and can be used as the basis of a vir­tual Law Enforce­ment Oper­a­tions (vLEO) sys­tem. 

vLEO and Law Enforce­ment or Court Practices

vLEO uses Certichron’s patent applied for OpenTDI and Cer­e­monies in Soft­ware™ process which allows for the vir­tu­al­iza­tion of a Law Enforce­ment Officer’s com­mis­sion through the NCCSL eNo­tary Pro­vi­sions now on the books in all fifty states. If your Cam­era Sys­tem or Red­light Ser­vice is down now, this vLEO ser­vice may be just what you need.  Call Cer­tichron at 800−511−2301 or email us at Sales@​Certichron.​COM

Police and Sheriff’s Depart­ments have a new hur­dle to leap and that is in meet­ing the new con­straints Khaled placed against their exist­ing evi­dence cap­ture and man­age­ment prac­tices

To make it pos­si­ble for Law Enforce­ment (LE) to pro­tect our cul­ture and to deal with the ris­ing costs of insur­ing that secu­rity Law Enforce­ment processes are turn­ing to both out­sourced or remotely oper­ated sur­veil­lance sys­tems which depend on vir­tu­al­iza­tion of inter­nal LE and many of the field-​​based LE Data Cap­ture Oper­a­tions which would ulti­mately lead to some form of pros­e­cu­tion and settlement-​​fine.

Tra­di­tional Evi­dence has been first-​​person in form

Tra­di­tion­ally in these mat­ters any cita­tions issued through those processes would gen­er­ally need to be issued by the Police Offi­cer or Sheriff’s Deputy who was oper­at­ing that sys­tem under the com­mis­sion of their office as a law enforce­ment offi­cer. Some States actu­ally have law lim­it­ing the issuance of cita­tions to requir­ing the office of a com­mis­sioned Law Enforce­ment Offi­cer to issue which com­pli­cates many sur­veil­lance and auto­mated traf­fic man­age­ment practices.

Certichron’s “Cer­e­monies in Soft­ware” allows for the vir­tu­al­iza­tion of Law Enforce­ment Functionality

Certichron’s Vir­tu­al­ized Law Enforce­ment Offi­cer, a Cer­e­mony in Soft­ware Prac­tice based on already-​​approved eNo­tary prac­tice addresses this require­ment fully mean­ing with Certichron’s sys­tem exist­ing Law Enforce­ment Agen­cies are ‘good-​​to-​​go’ to restart their traf­fic enforce­ment prac­tices immediately.

The use of the Notary statures ampli­fy­ing the Law Enforce­ment com­mis­sion cre­ates a new and pow­er­ful elec­tronic sign­ing resource with the inte­grated $15,000 bond all nota­rized sign­ings cre­ate. This sys­tem fully meets Cal­i­for­nia and other State require­ments since these states already rat­i­fied the spe­cific por­tions of the Notary Prac­tices Act’s as UCC mak­ing the Cer­tichron model already approved for roll­out across all 50 states.

In fact with proper imple­men­ta­tion of a new evidence-​​capture mind­set, many if not all exist­ing sys­tems can be brought into align­ment with the new con­trol require­ments to main­tain their admis­si­bil­ity into US and Cal­i­for­nia Courts.

The Vir­tu­al­ized LEO

The vir­tiual­ized LEO allows for Inten­tional Evi­dence from each stage of each process to be cre­ated under the com­mis­sion of the offi­cer attest­ing to the issuance of the cita­tions. The cap­ture of the data can be cer­ti­fied by adding a hash­ing time­stamp for each event. The report­ing or con­tain­ment receipt can be prop­erly acknowl­edged with a time­stamp request show­ing each com­po­nent move­ment of evi­dence con­tent, and when that con­tent is ephemeral in form this is the only way to prop­erly doc­u­ment con­trolled man­age­ment of that data.

With this sys­tem any exist­ing sys­tem can have trans­parency and the cer­ti­fy­ing process added to the process by the LEO sign­ing into the Ses­sion Man­ager and attest­ing that they are apply­ing their com­mis­sion as a LEO to that oper­at­ing ses­sion. The prac­tice also can be facil­i­tated against the Cam­era Oper­a­tions Mod­els today for any and all sys­tems (Red­Flex and Lock­heed, or ATS oper­ated in form). For all of these con­trol prac­tices the Cer­tichron DES infra­struc­ture allows the cre­ation and appli­ca­tion of the human com­mis­sion in a vir­tual sense
to these exist­ing systems.

For more infor­ma­tion on our ser­vices and tech­nolo­gies, please email Cer­tichron with your require­ments or con­tact the sales office directly at 800−511−2301 (9−5 PST). Cer­tichron, Inc. © 2009, 2010

Cer­tichron and Relify Secu­rity annouc­nce the avail­abil­ity of Certichron’s SecureNTP ser­vices to Relify Secu­rity customers.

Cer­tichron announces its part­ner­ship with Relify Secu­rity. Relify is a well estab­lished provider of com­mer­cial con­sult­ing and secu­rity review ser­vices for bank­ing, credit union and other PCI-​​DSS type clients as well as other Finan­cial Providers.

To quote Relify Security’s man­ag­ing part­ner:
“Relify Secu­rity has recently launched a part­ner­ship to deliver what Relify believes is a pretty unique and needed ser­vice. It address a prob­lem that we often don’t think about… Where do you get your time?”…

“SecureNTP pro­vides one time source for all uses: What this means is that there is one time source for every­thing finally — from Build­ing, Power, Secu­rity, IT Oper­a­tions and at last uni­form evi­dence across the entire entity. In most cases SecureNTP requires no instal­la­tion of hard­ware or soft­ware, since your busi­ness is likely already run­ning the NTP pro­to­col. Once you have reg­is­tered with Cer­tichron, it only takes a few minor con­fig­u­ra­tion changes and instal­la­tion of the dig­i­tal key, along with set­ting up audit log­ging and key man­age­ment practices.”
Mike Pear­son, CISSP
Man­ag­ing Partner

For more infor­ma­tion con­tact Relify Secu­rity, LLC
O/​F: 866.897.6900
M: 813.523.0151
www​.reli​fy​se​cu​rity​.com
Reli­able and Ver­i­fi­able Advanced Secu­rity Solutions

Cer­tichron announces DES, its Dig­i­tal Evi­dence Ser­vice. DES is a bolt-​​on time-​​centric content/​infrastructure syn­chro­niza­tion and time-​​evidence ser­vice. Certichron’s third-​​party DES offer­ing is the miss­ing piece of that puz­zle to make their pre­vi­ously weak evi­dence meet all of the exist­ing and emerg­ing evi­dence qual­i­fi­ca­tion hur­dles for Dig­i­tal Evi­dence. DES is avail­able as a ser­vice for exist­ing sys­tems and as a turn-​​key appli­ance type sys­tem to meet all archi­tec­ture require­ments and deploy­ment needs.

As just one exam­ple of its util­ity, for those oper­at­ing Red Light Cam­era Sys­tems which have gone dark based on Khaled The Khaled rul­ing from the Cal­i­for­nia Appel­late Court thas opened the door to the need for a trusted third party in all pub­lic evi­dence sys­tems and for them the DES ser­vice is a com­plete solu­tion. The DES solu­tion pro­vides a sys­tem whic can be engi­neered to pro­duce endur­ing evi­dence for all uses. The deploy­ment model can be either a local resource which can be oper­ated as a shared ser­vice between mul­ti­ple uses and users or one which can be oper­ated onsite for larger users. This cre­ates a time-​​stamp repos­i­tory ser­vice model for all users which is eas­ily doc­u­mented as “a method of time­stamp­ing and val­i­dat­ing the con­tent from vir­tu­ally any dig­i­tal event source to the legal US Time Standard”.

For a City Man­ager with Cam­era Net­works: The DES sup­ported Cam­era Net­work reg­is­ters each pic­ture and time it was cre­ated with the mas­ter Time Ser­vice Cen­ter serv­ing those sys­tems. The time-​​service model cre­ates inten­tional evi­dence which is fully court-​​admissible. The DES evidence-​​recordation or time­stamp ser­vice actu­ally runs over the IETF NTPv4 data trans­port seam­lessly as time-​​service requests. The same is true of a cor­po­rate CIO or CFO who needs to cre­ate prov­able evi­dence with a party who will prove their coör­di­na­tion to a NIST(UTC) timescale in thefirst-​​person.

Eas­ily Shared — a pri­vate time ser­vice can be shared or the Pub­lic Ser­vice can be used The ser­vice model for DES can be built as a shared or pri­vate resource. So this means a group of City Man­agers can band together to put a shared ser­vice model together for man­ag­ing all of the evi­den­tiary time­stamps for any use as an Offi­cial Gov­ern­men­tal Entity. They would pur­chase a secure sys­tem and share its oper­a­tions across a num­ber local jurisdictions.

Timestmap­ing done right… The DES type of NTP4v request has a diital hash for the event or other dig­i­tal object which it uploads to its ref­er­ence time-​​server and through this process the time-​​server responds to the requestor with (and reg­is­ters in its own log­ging sys­tem) both the request and the response tokens, at this same time the Ser­vice Bureau is reg­is­ter­ing those tokens in its own cryp­to­graph­i­cally secured log­ging sys­tem to insure no changes to those evi­dence attes­ta­tions are possible.

Fed­er­ally Cer­ti­fied Since NIST is the cal­i­brat­ing agent this ser­vice model pro­vides a prov­able instance of a dig­i­tal data object secured through time­stamp­ing to the US National Time Stan­dard, a dig­i­tal object who’s integrity or con­tent can­not be refuted under today’s evi­dence rules. Why this is impor­tant is that NIST is the ONLY LEGAL SOURCE OF TIME IN THE US per 15 USC sec­tions 271 and 272

SecureNTP as an Evi­dence Trans­port This set of fea­tures and ser­vice is 100% con­tained within the exended use model Cer­tichron built for the Net­work Time Pro­to­col (NTP). Certichron’s reliance on the stan­dard NTP Ser­vice to pro­vide these fea­tures means that there is zero security-​​risk impli­ca­tion from this sys­tems use. DES is today one of the only process-​​services capa­ble of cer­ti­fy­ing a dig­i­tal object to the NIST(UTC) timescale in a legally prov­able manner.

15 down and count­ing: With­out DES today 15 States are already either dark or going dark mean­ing their investment’s in their dig­i­tal evi­dence cap­ture sys­tems are now stand­ing in limbo, and in many instances there is a cost to turn these sys­tems off as Burlingame Cal­i­for­nia found out. SecureNTP is the opti­mum solu­tion since a City Oper­a­tions Cen­ter can con­tract for DES from our Internet-​​based ser­vice cen­ters or through our hard-​​wired Direct­Con­nect ser­vice cen­ters. The ser­vice sub­scrip­tion model is low cost and can be setup for a sin­gle site or mul­ti­ple uses on a per-​​use charge model or enterprise-​​wide license model.

For Appli­ca­tions like the fol­low­ing which all per­tain to Court Admis­si­ble Evi­dence, DES and its SecureNTP basic ser­vice cre­ate the basis of a strong and reli­able audit model around the evi­dence of time

• For Cam­era Sys­tem Oper­a­tors likeRed­Flex and ATS who’s sys­tems are now dark because of Khaled, and for
• Other Sur­veil­lance Sys­tem Oper­a­tions includ­ing but not lim­ited to
  • Court or Offi­cial Facil­ity Access
  • Police Depart­ment Access and cal­i­bra­tion of field data units and other devices
  • Bank­ing or Finan­cial Insti­tu­tion Access log­ging includ­ing phys­i­cal and data-​​level access to the Instu­tion or its ATM’s
  • Phar­macy or Med­ical Facil­ity Access, and of course for
  • Casino or Hotel Access

One size fits all As it hap­pens there are only cer­tain ways to pro­duce legally prov­able evi­dence which meets foren­sic guide­lines for evi­den­tiary comp­tence, and DES gives you a sin­gle solu­tion which can be oper­ated for any and all evi­dence cre­ation needs. DES comes com­plete with a yearly Securen­NTP sub­scrip­tion and can be deployed as an inplace service/​unit under lease from Cer­tichron or as client-​​placed ser­vices on a per-​​use basis. This charge model cre­ates the best pos­si­ble solu­tion for all uses and espe­cially offi­cial ones to allow the ser­vices most eco­nomic use possible.

DES records are stored either in Certichron’s site or option­ally in the clien’s off-​​site providers pos­ses­sion to insure proper com­pe­tence in the records. For more infor­ma­tion on DES see the DES page or send us an email telling us about your needs for evidence.

Cer­tichron pro­vides secure and auditable time ser­vices that allow com­pa­nies to prov­ably syn­chro­nize their desk­tops and trans­ac­tion servers with region­ally deployed, Federally-​​traceable time servers (using the Inter­net or a pri­vate extranet). For more infor­ma­tion on our ser­vices and tech­nolo­gies, please email Cer­tichron with your require­ments or con­tact the sales office directly at 800−511−2301 (9−5 PST). Cer­tichron, Inc. © 2009 Pri­vacy Pol­icy Terms of Use

Cus­tomer Pro­vi­sion­ing
Cer­tichron has updated the basic Cus­tomer Pro­vi­sion­ing Form with this new release.

Client’s pur­chas­ing or eval­u­at­ing SecureNTP will need to fill this form out for each site or sys­tem supported/​registered to use the SecureNTP service.

Sub­mit By Email
Please down­load, fill out and email this form to SUPPORT@​CERTICHRON.​COM to reg­is­ter that sys­tem with the SecureNTP pro­gram with the sub­ject “PRO­VI­SION” to queue that sys­tem for security-​​rule provisioning.

Lock Down
Certichron’s pri­vate time server’s are lock­ing down and will now all require sym­met­ric key tokens to be issued for each autho­rized user. This will pro­vide full log­ging and peer­ing infor­ma­tion for your time­set­ting events.

In the next two weeks all Pri­vate TS1 sys­tems will go sym­met­ric key. TS0 sys­tems are non-​​keyed but con­trolled by RESTRICT state­ments so all users of those sys­tems need to be reg­is­tered from this point onward.

Why you would want to use these sys­tems is that in addi­tion to its NIST servers Cer­tichron oper­ates a chain of secured time ser­vice cen­ters across the US. It can eas­ily pro­vide a mul­ti­point access model for NIST-​​calibrated ser­vices which are fully audited. No other ser­vice offers cus­tomer or Cer­tichron pri­vate net­work­ing ser­vices for NIST cal­i­brated tim­ing ser­vices anywhere.

Please con­tact your sales per­son at 800−511−2301 for more infor­ma­tion our to sign up for the Secured­NTP ser­vice. Con­tact Sales@​Certichron.​COM or Support@​Certichron.​COM for more information.

NGC Reg­u­la­tions say Gam­bling Sys­tems need secured time services

In today’s gam­bling ter­mi­nals and area con­trollers the time man­age­ment ser­vices need spe­cial atten­tion. Linux and other sys­tems which run NTP natively are more eas­ily con­fig­ured but many of them only run SNTP mean­ing that they are not capa­ble of rea­son­able strength authen­ti­ca­tion in their time-​​setting process and as such the evi­dence value of the time set­ting event is questionable.

In infra­struc­ture where dis­trib­uted or group gam­ing prac­tices are run, this has direct impli­ca­tions espe­cially in instance or reac­tion based games where the when of &9;when’ an event hap­pens is mea­sured in an instance locally and gen­er­ally trans­ferred into a multi-​​event sched­uler which is the core of the multi-​​terminal gam­ing sys­tem. There are of course many vari­ants, but the goal and the real win is in uni­fy­ing the evi­dence model such that real-​​automated inline con­trols are effective.

The fol­low­ing are exam­ples of the lan­guage (com­ments are in ital­ics):

Reg­u­la­tions:

http://​gam​ing​.nv​.gov/​s​t​a​t​s​_​r​e​g​s​/​a​l​l​_​r​e​g​s​.​pdf

 Oper­a­tion of Gam­ing Estab­lish­ments 5.108.2.(f) At the request of the chair­man, an oper­a­tor shall pro­vide and main­tain, at its sole expense and at such loca­tion as the chair­man may des­ig­nate, a ter­mi­nal and printer for the pur­pose of mon­i­tor­ing infor­ma­tion regard­ing the sys­tem includ­ing, but not lim­ited to, the cur­rent pro­gres­sive pay­off sched­ules, reset funds, the real-​​time date and time, the num­ber and loca­tion of gam­ing devices and games con­nected to the sys­tem, the names of per­sons access­ing the main com­puter or data com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­po­nents of the sys­tem, the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of func­tions being per­formed by such per­sons, the audi­ble noti­fi­ca­tion of any pro­gres­sive pay­off sched­ule won, and the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the loca­tion, machine num­ber, and amount of any pro­gres­sive pay­off sched­ule won.

5.200.3.(b) Estab­lish a log that con­tains the name of each salon patron of the gam­ing salon, as well as the times each salon patron enters and leaves the gam­ing salon. The log shall be main­tained for a period of not less than two years.

Sur­veil­lance Stan­dards 2.010.7. The sur­veil­lance sys­tem must include date and time gen­er­a­tors which pos­sess the capa­bil­ity to dis­play the date and time of recorded events on video tape record­ings. The dis­played date and time must not sig­nif­i­cantly obstruct the recorded view.

Dig­i­tal Video Record­ing Stan­dards: 5. All dig­i­tal video disks or other stor­age media pro­duced from the DVR sys­tem must con­tain the data with the time and date it was recorded super­im­posed, the media player that has the soft­ware nec­es­sary to view the DVR images, as well as a video ver­i­fi­ca­tion encryp­tion code (also known as a watermark).

Tech­ni­cal Stan­dards for Gam­ing Devices and On-​​Line Slot Sys­tems: 1.050.2.(b) For the sys­tem por­tion of the sys­tem sup­ported game, gam­bling event server or sys­tem com­po­nent must reside in a secure area where access is lim­ited to autho­rized per­son­nel. Log­i­cal access to the sys­tem sup­ported game shall be logged on the server com­po­nent and remotely on a log­ging device which resides out­side the secure area and is not acces­si­ble to the indi­vid­ual access­ing the secure area. Logged data shall include: time and date of the access and the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the access­ing individual(S). The result­ing logs shall be retained for a min­i­mum of 90 days.

1.066.5. A sys­tem sup­ported or sys­tem based game must log each remote access on the server or sys­tem part of the gam­ing device and on the sec­ondary log­ging device. The log must include time and date of the access and a list of pro­grams trans­ferred or changed.

1.084.5. Sys­tem sup­ported games must pro­vide a log entry any­time an indi­vid­ual causes a soft­ware com­po­nent to be added, removed or altered in the server or sys­tem por­tion of the device. Each log entry must con­tain the date and time of the action, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the com­po­nent affected, the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the indi­vid­ual per­form­ing the mod­i­fi­ca­tion, the rea­son for the mod­i­fi­ca­tion and any per­ti­nent val­i­da­tion infor­ma­tion. (See sim­i­lar lan­guage in 1.084.6, 1.086.5 and 1.086.6,)

The require­ments are like­wise enu­mer­ated through­out all of the NGC Stan­dard for all other devices in the Casino or Gam­bling Ter­mi­nal oper­a­tions. L1 GPS sys­tems alone don’t cut it any­more, proof demands evi­dence which will stand the test of time. 

Certichron’s SecureNTP anchor’s gam­bling net­works so that their time­stamps are prov­able. Self-​​attested time­stamps are no longer prov­able and since fraud in eTrans­ac­tions hap­pens in an instant, the proper time­line cor­re­la­tion in pros­e­cu­tions and sur­veil­lance sys­tems is key.

See also Certichron’s press release about the new Las Vegas SecureNTP™ ser­vice cen­ter open­ing up there.

Certichron’s NTP Ser­vice called SecureNTP™ is the answer to the prob­lem of rely­ing on self-​​operated or unau­then­ti­cated third-​​party time sources in use pretty much every­where in the unau­then­ti­cated world.

Today the abil­ity to pro­duce proof of your actions which will stand the test of a Court has a new set of hur­dles and time-​​stamping and the abil­ity to show that time can be cor­re­lated across any num­ber of sys­tems and any num­bers of loca­tions is key in cre­at­ing uni­form dig­i­tal evidence.

For peo­ple need­ing real proof which will stand the test of years, only Certichron’s third-​​party time man­age­ment prac­tices and dig­i­tal evi­dence trust-​​anchor works. All of the other solu­tions are based on GPS or other unre­li­able and eas­ily spoofed time-​​solutions, ones which were designed for use in a nicer, more gen­tile time. Unfor­tu­nately hack­ing and the dig­i­tal bar­rage being what it is — dig­i­tal evi­dence is impor­tant, so inten­tion­ally cre­at­ing evi­dence in which the time-​​data is eas­ily dis­proved is silly and self-​​destructive.  ser­vice addresses this and as CI’s CTO I strongly sug­gest you look at it as a bolt on for exist­ing sys­tems which need prov­abil­ity and as a core com­po­nent of new ephemeral trust models.

/​/​TSG

Certichron’s Extranet ser­vices called Direct­Con­nect™ may be just what you are look­ing for in a third-​​party time source solu­tion. Certichron’s Direct­Con­nect Extranet ser­vice allows pri­vate (non-​​Internet based) con­nec­tions to Certichron’s NIST-​​calibrated tim­ing ser­vice cen­ters so you are immune from Internet-​​based Denial of Ser­vice Attacks in your reliance on the NIST time ser­vices so crit­i­cal to US and global commerce.

For more infor­ma­tion on Direct­Con­nect check out the link above or con­tact our sales office at 800−511−2301 or through email at Sales@​Certichron.​COM

Cer­tichron and JTime!® MEIN­BERG USA Part­ner to Offer Certichron’s Prov­able SecureNTP Ser­vices to Mein­berg Cus­tomers!
Of the var­i­ous global pro­duc­ers of net­work clocks and time servers, Mein­berg in Ger­many has always stood out as a leader in reli­able, pre­ci­sion time keep­ing sys­tems. And it is for that rea­son that I’m par­tic­u­larly pleased with the recent announce­ment that Cer­tichron and Meinberg’s US dis­trib­u­tor (JTime!® MEIN­BERG USA) are part­ner­ing to offer Certichron’s SecureNTP ser­vices to Mein­berg cus­tomers. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion on this impor­tant announce­ment, click here.

As the press release states:

“Mein­berg LAN­TIME sys­tem own­ers already know how impor­tant accu­rate time is. Certichron’s SecureNTP™ ser­vice enhances their time man­age­ment prac­tices by cre­at­ing “prov­able” time – inde­pen­dent ver­i­fi­ca­tion as to the accu­racy and source of time set­tings. If inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tions, expo­sure to lit­i­ga­tion or com­pli­ance with reg­u­la­tions or indus­try stan­dards are impor­tant risks in your busi­ness, then your time set­tings must be prov­able. This includes com­pli­ance with indus­try stan­dards such as the Pay­ment Card Indus­try Data Secu­rity Stan­dard (PCI DSS) and the FINRA Order Audit Trail Sys­tem (OATS) and such laws as HIPAA, GLBA and SOX. You should be able to demon­strate to audi­tors, reg­u­la­tors, law enforce­ment or the courts that the time set­tings on your elec­tronic records sup­port your asser­tions. If you can not sub­stan­ti­ate “when” an event occurred, then the data as to “who” and “what” will likely be dis­cred­ited or, in the worst case, thrown out in court as unre­li­able, unprov­able dig­i­tal tes­ti­mony. SecureNTP cre­ates third-​​party ini­tial­iza­tion and track­ing events to pro­vide foren­sic assur­ance that your Mein­berg pre­ci­sion solu­tion was work­ing prop­erly and that the net­work was prop­erly synchronized.”

And all of this can be imple­mented on exist­ing Mein­berg NTP and PTP LAN­TIME sys­tems with­out sig­nif­i­cant changes in oper­a­tional pro­ce­dures or the need for new software.

Con­sider the pos­si­bil­i­ties when you com­bine a highly pre­cise and reli­able time source such as one of the Mein­berg LAN­TIME sys­tems with Certichron’s prov­able time keep­ing ser­vices, espe­cially in such areas as auto­mated secu­ri­ties trad­ing or SCADA con­trol sys­tems where there are strin­gent sub-​​microsecond tim­ing require­ments cou­pled with the need for an evi­den­tiary trail of  proper-​​time-​​management practices. 

“I have talked for years in var­i­ous forums about the need for more strin­gent time keep­ing prac­tices to ensure that the time stamps in dig­i­tal records can qual­ify as reli­able dig­i­tal evi­dence in lit­i­ga­tion. But let’s face it, up until now imple­ment­ing a robust time set­ting prac­tice was mostly a build it your­self effort and one where there were few guar­anties of suc­cess. Now with the com­bi­na­tion of Meinberg’s time keep­ing sys­tems and Certichron’s ser­vices we have taken a big step to address­ing these prob­lems with one sim­ple solu­tion. And this is only the begin­ning.” — Todd Glassey — Cer­tichron Chief Sci­en­tist and CTO

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