An Implementation of the Audit Control Environment (ACE) to Support the Long Term Integrity of Digital Archives

In this paper, we describe the implementation of the AuditControl Environment (ACE)[1] system that provides a scalable,
auditable platform for ensuring the integrity of digital archival
holdings. The core of ACE is a small integrity token issued for
each monitored item, which is part of a larger, externally
auditable cryptographic system. Two components that describe
this system, an Audit Manager and Integrity Management
Service, have been developed and released. The Audit Manager
component is designed to be installed locally at the archive, while
the Integrity Management Service is a centralized, publically
available service. ACE allows for the monitoring of collections on
a variety of disk and grid based storage systems. Each collection
in ACE is subject to monitoring based on a customizable policy.
The released ACE Version 1.0 has been tested extensively on a
wide variety of collections in both centralized and distributed
environments.