Jikzi: A New Framework for Secure Publishing

Abstract

Jikzi was the first ever book published using a movable-type printing press, it was manufactured in a temple in Korea in 1377 and thus predated Gutenberg by a generation.

Now this is work that I’ve done with Jong-Hyeon Lee who’s one of my research students. What’s it about? Well, we were told that we needed a talk that was relevant to the entertainment industry and also had a strong audit content. Jikzi is a system that is suitable for entertainment in that it is a system for publishing, and publishing arbitrary things, anything from the latest rock-n-roll single through to a great big wadge of public key certificates. What we’re trying to do is build a general purpose publishing system, and there is a heavy emphasis on accountability, on being able, if you are a customer, to be pretty well certain that the instance of the book that you now have sitting in your browser is a valid instance of the book, that it is timely, that it has not been tampered with, and so on and so forth.

Joint work with Jong-Hyeon Lee.