Veritaa: A distributed public key infrastructure with signature store

Abstract

Summary Today, the integrity and authenticity of digital documents and data are often hard to verify. Existing public key infrastructures (PKIs) are capable of certifying digital identities but do not provide solutions to store signatures immutably, and the process of certification is often not transparent. We propose Veritaa, a distributed public key infrastructure with an integrated signature store (DPKISS). The central part of Veritaa is the Graph of Trust that manages identity claims and singed declarations between identity claims and document identifiers. An application‐specific distributed ledger is used to store the transactions that form the Graph of Trust immutably. For the distributed certification of identity claims, a reputation system based on signed trust declarations and domain vetting is used. In this work, we have designed and implemented the proposed architecture of Veritaa, created a testbed, and performed several experiments. The experiments show the benefits and the high performance of Veritaa.