# Notarization and Anti-Plagiarism: A New Blockchain Approach
## 2 Notarization  
Traditionally, the process of notarization consists of a set of activities designed to assure the parties involved in a transaction (e.g., formation of a company, patent application, intellectual property protection) that the documents attesting to it are authentic [9]. All these activities involve various stakeholders, ranging from the party's requesting notarization to the central authority that, by way of simplification, ensures the veracity and the legal validity of the necessary documents and the signatures applied to those documents. In essence, the central institution ensures the validity of the transaction by overseeing the process. Take into consideration three different perspectives: the notary's perspective, the grantor of the power of attorney perspective, and the IT administrator perspective. The analysis from these three different perspectives performed by [PERSON] [10] gives us a preliminary view of some of the high-level requirements needed to implement a blockchain-based notarization service. As also pointed out by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [11], it emerges that one of the main aspects to be taken care of is the timing of data registration on blockchain. Depending on the congestion of the blockchain network used, there can be even a few hours difference between the time when the data registration on blockchain is requested and the time when it actually happens. In addition, the need emerges to save the submitted documents in some way in a repository [10], to be available when there is a need to verify their legitimacy. There are several blockchain-based notarization apps on the market today, both decentralized and centralized. In order to compare them, we identified the features and the functionalities that a notarization app should have. For notarization apps, these are:  
* Supported blockchains;
* File custody service;
* Hash custody service;
* P2P file custody service;
* Free space size;
* Type of archive server (centralized or decentralized);
* Notarization Report (PDF);
* Custom notarized file template;
* Multiple digital signatures;
* File sharing; and
* Massive file upload. The first basic feature for the notarization apps considered in this paper is the supported blockchain(s). The most basic notarization apps should use only one blockchain, while more advanced ones should use more than one. The goal of using multiple blockchains is to have backup and redundancy services available. When--even if it is a remote possibility--all nodes in a network are turned off,using a single blockchain the user would not be able to access the notarized files. Instead, using a redundancy mechanism, the files requested by the user at the time of a network of nodes going down would still be available. The file custody service consists of storing the notarized file in a dedicated user space. This will ensure that the file will always be available to the users when they need to prove the trustworthiness of the file recorded within the blockchain. Similar to the file custody service, the hash custody service allows users to have access to the hash of each and every previously notarized file. The P2P file custody service would allow the notarized file to be split in many small fragments within the blockchain being used. This makes it impossible to reconstruct a file unless you are the owner of the file. In this context, any latency and speed issues in retrieving files from the blockchain network can be solved through the application of edge computing and edge caching principles. The effect is twofold. In addition to increased performance in file retrieval, there are added benefits in terms of privacy preservation and in terms of security [12]. Reliability is also guaranteed, because in the event that several nodes on the network fall at the same time, the edge caching file retrieval system will repair them and make them available to the user at the same time as a file is retrieved from the network. There are also very substantial advantages in reducing costs.