Immutable document sealing and authentication

A data processing system adapted for immutable document sealing, the system comprising:

• a host computing platform comprising one or more computers, each with memory and one or processing units including one or more processing cores;
• persistent storage accessible by the host computing platform;
• and,
• a sealing module comprising computer program instructions enabled while executing in the memory of at least one of the processing units of the host computing platform to perform:
• loading a digital image of a document into the memory;
• applying random snowflaking to the digital image by incorporating one or more non-visible elements to the digital image;
• generating a primary salted hash value from at least a portion of the snowflaked digital image;
• combining the primary salted hash value with a file name for the digital image and generating a secondary salted hash value of the combination;
• adding the secondary salted hash value to the file name for the digital image of the document to produce a modified form of the file name;
• and,
• persisting the snowflaked digital image into a new file with the modified form of the file name as a new name for the new file;
• and,
• authenticating the new file by:
• extracting the new file name for the new file and extracting from the new file name the file name and the secondary salted hash value;
• computing a document hash for the new file and computing a file hash for the new file, while also computing a file name hash for the document hash in combination with the file name, and then computing a combined hash of the document hash and the file name hash;
• comparing the combined hash to the secondary salted hash value;
• and,
• authenticating the new file on condition that the comparison results in a determination that the combined hash is identical to the secondary salted hash value.

A computing device comprising a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions stored therein, the instructions being executable by at least one processing core of a processing unit to cause the processing unit to perform immutable document sealing, by:

• loading a digital image of a document into memory of a computer;
• applying random snowflaking to the digital image by incorporating one or more non-visible elements to the digital image;
• generating a primary salted hash value from at least a portion of the snowflaked digital image;
• combining the primary salted hash value with a selected name for the digital image and generating a secondary salted hash value of the combination;
• adding the secondary salted hash value to the selected name for the digital image of the document to produce a modified form of the file name;
• and,
• persisting the snowflaked digital image into a new file with the modified form of the file name as a new name for the new file;
• and,
• authenticating the new file by:
• extracting the new file name for the new file and extracting from the new file name the file name and the secondary salted hash value;
• computing a document hash for the new file and computing a file hash for the new file, while also computing a file name hash for the document hash in combination with the file name, and then computing a combined hash of the document hash and the file name hash;
• comparing the combined hash to the secondary salted hash value;
• and,
• authenticating the new file on condition that the comparison results in a determination that the combined hash is identical to the secondary salted hash value.