What is the Daily Report about and all those codes on it?

Posted on September 2, 2014 • 2 min read • 335 words

I wanted to download a delivery receipt from the user private area, but I ended downloading a PDF file named Daily Report containing a hundred pages with thousands of meaningless codes. Please explain what this Daily Report is.

For every email you register through eEvidence, we generate an eEvid.Cert delivery receipt that contains the following information:

  1. Relevant header information from the registered email: sender's and recipient's addresses, the date you sent the email, the email subject, the names of any files attached to the email and the IP address from which the email was delivered to us.
  2. A hash (digital fingerprint) obtained from the original email and a hash from each file attached to your email, if any.
  3. Relevant information from the transmission of your email to intended recipient(s), including the email delivery acceptance by each recipient's legitimate mail server.

Finally, we attach a full copy of the original email to the eEvid.Cert PDF (see the Attachment Panel on Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat), and we digitally sign the delivery receipt to grant its integrity.

About the Daily Report

The Daily Report is a complementary report, meant to officially date every delivery receipt issued on a given day. By officially dating the Daily Report, we can prove that each eEvid.Cert, and its contents, already existed on that date.

The Daily Report consists of two columns of data:

  1. Left column, listing the unique ID of every eEvid.Cert issued the day before. This is the same code we use to name the eEvid.Certs.
  2. Right column, listing the hash obtained from each eEvid.Cert.

The Daily Report is also digitally signed, as every eEvid.Cert is. However, the Daily Report digital signature also includes a digital time-stamp (RFC 3161), issued by an official Time Stamp Authority (TSA, from the Wikipedia). Similar to a Matryoshka doll, the time-stamped Daily Report then becomes the top layer of the electronic evidence, unequivocally proving the date in which the hash of the eEvid.Cert already existed. And if a hash existed on a given date, the file from which it was obtained existed on that date as well.

Bottom line. Do not worry too much about the Daily Report. Keep your eEvid.Certs in a safe place and we'll take care of the rest.