These go to eleven!

September 7, 2008

Non-repudiative logging

Filed under: Java — Tags: , , — Zbigniew Cyktor @ 1:20 pm

Non-repudiation is a very interesting subject at the intersection of technology and law. For the sake of exercise let’s imagine a very simple scenario in which we’d like to have some specific user actions logged into a file in a way that would allow us to find out later, whether anybody has modified the content of such a log file. Let’s naively assume that anything that the application puts to logs can be trusted.

In order to accomplish this task, we will create a Log4j appender that will calculate an HMAC (hash) of every logged event and attach it to the log file as well.

(more…)

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