Stuart Haber
============

Role at Verae
-------------

**Stuart Haber** is a **co-founder of Verae**. The company's
public site introduces him as one of the creators of
blockchain and as the inventor, in 1991, of cryptographic
timestamping --- "the science that lets you prove a record
hasn't been altered, and the foundation under every
blockchain since." The site quotes him:

   "I co-founded Verae to make blockchain accessible to
   enterprises without having to deal with the complexity of
   blockchain."

   --- Stuart Haber, Co-Founder of Verae; co-inventor of
   blockchain timestamping, 1991

Verae's product claim is that this is the proof Haber has
been building toward: simple enough for a compliance team,
precise enough for an SEC exam, with the customer's records
remaining in the customer's storage and only a fingerprint
being sealed.

The scientific work
-------------------

Haber is a cryptographer. He worked at **Bellcore** (Bell
Communications Research) in Morristown, New Jersey, in the
late 1980s and 1990s, in the research culture descended from
Bell Labs. With physicist **W. Scott Stornetta** he posed a
problem that looks obvious only after it is solved: digital
documents live on media that can be altered without a mark;
how do you certify **when the bits existed**, without
trusting the disk, and without handing the document to the
timestamping service?

**1991.** Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, "How to
Time-Stamp a Digital Document," *Journal of Cryptology*,
volume 3, number 2, pages 99--111. This is the paper that
introduces computationally practical digital timestamping
so that a user cannot back-date or forward-date a document
even with the collusion of a timestamping service, while
keeping the document itself private. Bitcoin's white paper
cites it as reference **[3]**.

**1993.** Dave Bayer, Stuart Haber, and W. Scott Stornetta,
"Improving the Efficiency and Reliability of Digital
Time-Stamping," in *Sequences II: Methods in Communication,
Security and Computer Science*, pages 329--334. Merkle
trees, efficient certificates, publication of a compact
root. Bitcoin's white paper cites it as reference **[4]**.

**1997.** Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, "Secure names
for bit-strings," *Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on
Computer and Communications Security*, pages 28--35. Bitcoin's
white paper cites it as reference **[5]**.

Those three papers are **three of the eight** citations in
Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash
System" (2008). Haber has remarked that this is a .375
batting average, and that Bitcoin is an application built on
top of the early blockchain rather than the invention of the
data structure itself. That is a historical statement, not a
claim that Verae is Bitcoin.

Surety, 1994: first commercial blockchain
-----------------------------------------

Haber and Stornetta took the research into production as
**Surety**. Surety hashed customer documents, linked those
hashes in a chain of certificates, and published a weekly
summary hash in the classified section of the Sunday *New
York Times*. That analog publication is widely described as
the oldest surviving public blockchain: a commitment that
does not depend on Surety's servers remaining honest or
online, because the *Times* is independently archived. The
design idea --- **commit a compact fingerprint to a widely
witnessed record, without revealing the documents** --- is
the same idea Verae productizes for enterprise compliance.

Other cryptographic publications
--------------------------------

Haber's research record is broader than timestamping. It
includes work on minimum-knowledge interactive proofs,
symmetric public-key encryption, and secure multi-party
protocols (including "Cryptographic Computation: Secure
Fault-Tolerant Protocols and the Public-Key Model"). A
reader who wants the academic trail should start with the
three Bitcoin-cited papers and the 1991 *Journal of
Cryptology* article, then the ACM CCS 1997 paper.

Why this biography is in the briefing
-------------------------------------

Timestamping in this document is not a metaphor. It is a
specific scientific object --- hash, time, sequence, privacy
of the document from the notary --- that Haber defined in
print in 1991, commercialized in 1994, and is now building
into Verae so that a CCO can produce a receipt instead of a
vendor letter. The biography is here as **provenance of the
receipt**, not as a substitute for the organization's
controls.

The same honesty that applies to Peergos applies here:
Haber co-invented the timestamping chain; he did not issue
the customer's SOC 2.