Ace:Main

ACE (Auditing Control Environment) is a prototype system that incorporates a new methodology to address the integrity of long term archives using rigorous cryptographic techniques. ACE continuously audits the contents of the various objects according to the policy set by the archive, and provides mechanisms for an independent third-party auditor to certify the integrity of any object.

Our approach will allow an independent auditor to verify the integrity of every version of an archived digital object as well as link the current version to the original form of the object when it was ingested into the archive. Also, ACE is very cost effective and scalable while making no assumptions about the archive architecture.

ACE consists of two components, the first an Audit Manager(AM) that checks files locally to ensure they have not been compromised. The second part, the Integrity Management Service (IMS), issues tokens that the AM can use to verify that its local store of file digests has not been tampered with. In addition the IMS published a daily witness that can be used to ensure the IMS has not acted maliciously or been compromised.

Audit Manager	Integrity Management Service
[[Audit Manager Installation Guide|Installation Guide	System Documentation
[[Audit Manager User Guide|User Guide	IMS Witness Google Goup
	IMS Witness UMIACS listserv

Future improvements to ACE include expanding the list types of storage that the Audit Manager recognizes and creating tools to facilitate 3rd party auditing of the IMS. A complete roadmap can be found here