Patent ID: 7181623

Claim:
A method of preventing upload overloads of data from a plurality of clients at different locations within a network to a common destination server in the network, the steps comprising: generating a unique identifier corresponding to and dependent on data that each client intends to send to the common destination server, the unique identifier being smaller in size than the data of the client; separately transmitting the unique identifiers from each client to at least one authenticator trusted by the common destination server, wherein the at least one authenticator is a component of the destination server; separately time-stamping the unique identifiers as received by the at least one authenticator; separately sending back to each client a message, digitally signed by the at least one authenticator, with the unique identifier sent by that client and the corresponding time-stamp; each client then sending its data towards the common destination server; and the common destination server using the unique identifier for the data provided by each client to confirm that the data provided by each client existed as of the corresponding time-stamp and to insure that the data has been unaltered after the corresponding time-stamp.