How long are X-Wire messages protected?
Even though the strongest forms of cryptography and digital signatures are used in X-Wire, one must, if only for the sake of maintaining a proper academic attitude, assume that eventually the signing keys to messages will be compromised. Twenty-five to fifty years from now, keys used to sign messages today might easily be broken – yet the world needs records with integrity guaranteed “ad infinitum”. Mortgage deeds or life insurance policies, for example, can easily have economic life spans of twenty-five to fifty years (or more) and no current electronic signature mechanism can guarantee the authenticity of documents for such a long time. Thus, the need for the concatenated hash, which is a unique and powerful feature only found in X-Wire.
