# 🏛️ Vulos Architecture

### Vulos Digital Identity

Digital identity has always been a problem in the digital world because of the decentralized nature of the internet. For an e-signature to have the same legal status as a normal signature individual has to be identified to give him a unique digital identity. We have addressed this problem through the use of Hyperledger blockchain. The following diagram explains how each user will be registered into the blockchain and it will be provided a unique digital identity for him that will prove that he is the signer of a certain document.

![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/3RQwPN262vaOGSZCnL9FcuvNxj91k9EDpIdZKFOOHVRZrkFVPvPFRueWaVwYtTcnxN0Kgxk-KKjue6ESIpCrPvC-KaeZ_W5KzCf9Tx3b2aQFoPZd5lkPCA6P789BhIiZc845j84)

As you’ve seen, an actor or a node is able to participate in the blockchain network using a digital identity issued by an authority trusted by the system. In the most common case, digital identities (or simply identities) have the form of cryptographically validated digital certificates that comply with the X.509 standard and are issued by a Certificate Authority (CA).

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/iA1xaO0IOJg3WQxFU3QDg3EKucJmux89SsvwXmFiFRVUdbPDi-bZRUaZwnad3igHsrtuRToFZTeJSlx1MZ8SaKV16H6SwJXGn4VapSFQYmUhDdHIPloQfqI5v0XSg6AsPJ2oFIY)

A Certificate Authority distributes certificates to different actors. These certificates are digitally signed by the CA and bind together the actor with the actor’s public key (and optionally with a comprehensive list of properties). As a result, if one trusts the CA (and knows its public key), it can trust that the specific actor is bound to the public key included in the certificate, and owns the included attributes, by validating the CA’s signature on the actor’s certificate.

### Vulos Digital Signature

The diagram below shows the process of signing a document while maintaining the integrity of that document.

![Digitally signing and verifying a document](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/MUh3e9Tv0Q7hOY4FtyKXrYdNG2opctqNPJnaCUC26MvM57935PW4UNnV8831sRCkTERwtXylwlMx5S2iLem8D7JfieWJGtjMd7dF2ivxJWucpboGRW8jncdNQYeSczZxk1jiuxU)

Digital signatures, produced in this way, provide us with evidence of a document’s integrity, since changing the document, intentionally or not, would result in the receiver calculating a different message digest. 

The digital signature also provides us with non-repudiation, since it is clear that the person who created the original digest had access to the identical document, and as long as that person maintained control of his private key, he’s the only one who could have produced the signature. When used for digital signature purposes, the private key is sometimes called the signing key, and the public key is called the verification key. Technically, these keys operate in the same way as standard public-key pairs, the terminology simply indicates clearly which key is used for what purpose.


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