WO 2017/136643 A1 - System And Method For Secure Management Of Digital Contracts - The Lens

System And Method For Secure Management Of Digital Contracts

Published: Aug 10, 2017
Earliest Priority: Feb 03 2016
Family: 3
Cited Works: 0
Cited by: 0
Cites: 4
Additional Info: Full text

Abstract

A system and method for the secure management of digital contracts utilizes technology from the following fields: digital timestamping, encryption, distributed storage, and distributed payment systems. The existing state-of-the-art contract management systems require counter- parties to give a substantial level of trust to third parties to perform functions such as storage and verification. This system and method reduces the amount of trust that the counterparties need to give to a single third party. The system and method may be used for the secure construction and management of digital contract data and metadata.

Claims

A system comprising:
a computer system having a distributed ledger blockchain node, the node having a plurality of blocks wherein each block contains block metadata and one or more records wherein each record contains information about a transaction within the block;
a secure contract management server that is capable of being connected to the distributed ledger blockchain node using an interface;
a computing device that is capable of connecting to the secure contract management server over a network independent of the interface between the secure contract management server and the distributed ledger blockchain node; and
the secure contract management server having a processor and a memory that is configured to construct, manage and securely store contract data and contract metadata, the secure contract management server further comprising a validation engine to validate the blocks in the distributed ledger blockchain node, an encoding engine to encode contract documents and a contact processing engine to perform contact negotations, collection of contract details and managing the validation engine and the encoding engine.
The system of claim 1 , wherein the secure contract management server further comprises a signature engine to collect signatures from two or more entities to a contract being managed by the secure contract management server.
The system of claim 2, wherein the secure contract management server further comprises a payment engine to manage one or more payments between the two or more entities to the contract.
The system of claim 3, wherein the secure contract management server further comprises a user account engine to manage the two or more entities to the contract.
The system of claim 1, wherein the distributed ledger blockchain node further comprises a bitcoin client full node.
The system of claim 5, wherein the distributed ledger blockchain node further comprises a bitcoin network interface that interfaces the bitcoin client full node to the bitcoin network.
The system of claim 1, wherein the encoding engine is configured to perform one or more of encryption, compute cryptographic hashes, validate cryptographically signed documents and excute compression algorithms.
A contract management method, comprising:
providing a distributed ledger blockchain node, the node having a plurality of blocks wherein each block contains block metadata and one or more records wherein each record contains information about a transaction within the block;
initializing, by a secure contract management server, a contract between two counter parties, the initializing the contract further comprising providing contract details for the contract between the two counter parties;
collecting, by the secure contract management server, signatures of each of the counter parties to the contract within an expiry time;
storing, in a private repository connected to the secure contract management server, contract data and metadata about the contract that is signed by the two counter parties;
storing, in a distributed ledger blockchain node connected to the secure contract management server, two transactions in a block of the distributed ledger blockchain node, the first transaction containing a uniform resource locator reference to the contract data and contract metadata stored in the private repository and the second transaction containing a cryptographic hash of the contract data; and
confirming that the first and second transactions associated with the contract between the two counter parties are stored in the block of the distributed ledger blockchain node.
The method of claim 8 further comprising registering each counter party with the secure contract management server.
The method of claim 8, wherein providing contract details further comprising providing one or more of an email address for each counter party, an expiry time for each signature and a copy of a contract document.
The method of claim 10, wherein the contract details further include a message and payment details for the contract.
The method of claim 8 further comprising negotiating the contract details before the signatures are collected.
The method of claim 8, wherein the private repository storing further comprises encrypting the contract data and metadata.
14 The method of claim 8, wherein the distributed ledger blockchain node storing further comprises creating the two transactions between a first wallet and a second wallet.
The method of claim 14, wherein storing the first transaction in the distributed ledger blockchain node further comprises encoding the uniform resource locator reference.