dattester

A dattester is a software agent, service, or role that issues attestations about data items or datasets. An attestation is a statement that a data item possesses certain properties, such as origin, integrity, or compliance, at a given point in time. Dattesters are typically part of data platforms, data marketplaces, or governance workflows.

Core capabilities include provenance capture (recording source, transformations, and custody); integrity verification (cryptographic hashes and checksums); attestation generation (cryptographic signatures or verifiable credentials binding data to an attestation); policy enforcement; lifecycle management (issuance, rotation, revocation, expiration); and proof dissemination (making attestations verifiable by downstream consumers). Attestations are often bound to data objects via identifiers and may use digital signatures, hash chains, or verifiable credentials, in conjunction with PKI or decentralized identifiers. They can be stored in tamper-evident logs, registries, or distributed ledgers to support auditability and non-repudiation.

Typical use cases include data provenance in data lakes and warehouses; supply chain data tracing; regulatory compliance and audit readiness; data sharing and data marketplaces where recipients require proofs of data origin and quality; data quality monitoring and governance.

Limitations and challenges include ensuring trust in the attester, secure key management, revocation, scalability, and privacy concerns when recording metadata about sensitive data.