Patent ID: 7000118

Claim:
A method for providing one or more independent auditors an audit trail having one or more records for a database system, an integrity of the audit trail being vulnerable to actions taken by an access-privileged user other than the auditors, the database system having a writing machine (writer) not under the control of the access-privileged user or the auditors, each record having a corresponding authentication token and a validation token, the method comprising: initiating the audit trail by generating an initial value of an authentication token and an initial value of a validation token based on a first encryption key of a first type (writer public key) generated by the writer and a second encryption key of the first type generated by each Auditor (auditor public key); generating a third encryption key of a second type (writer private key) related to the first encryption key and a fourth encryption key of a second type (auditor private key) related to the second encryption key; updating the values of the writer private key, the authentication token, and the validation token for each additional audit trail record and integrating the updated values of the validation token and the writer public key into each corresponding record of the audit trail; and validating, by the auditor, each record of the audit trail by comparing the integrated validation token with a newly computed validation token in order to detect a tampering of the audit trail.