Platform basics

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Legal services
  3. The concepts
  4. Evidence manager

Introduction

We currently have one type of legal services: Digital Trust.

Digital Trust

Digital Trust provides a set of services whose objective is to facilitate the development of use cases where guaranteeing maximum legal security is a fundamental requirement of the product.

The functionality provided by Digital Trust are supported by cloud technology, blockchain and trusted third parties to provide the best balance between technological flexibility and security.

Digital Trust is made up of three functionalities:

  • Evidence manager: It facilitates the registration and custody of testimonies in different digital formats. Its immutability is guaranteed through a trusted third party (TSP) or Blockchain technology (DLT).
  • Notification manager: Service that allows the sending of certified electronic notifications guaranteeing the identity of the sender and recipient, the integrity of the notification and the moment in which each of the milestones of the notice takes place.
  • Chat manager: Secure and reliable communication platform that allows you to generate real-time conversations with certified messages, for several parties, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of the shared information.

The Concepts

Here is a list of the concepts that you will see listed throughout this guide.

  • DLT: “Decentralized Ledger Technology”, referring to blockchain technology.
  • TSP: “Trust Service Provider” , that are specifically accredited to deliver the highest levels of compliance with the EU eIDAS electronic signature regulation
  • Evidence: An entity that represents proof that a hash (sah256) of a file has been timestamped.
  • Evidence group: It is an entity that allows evidence to be grouped in it. A group can have N pieces of "Evidence".
  • Case file: It is an entity that allows "Groups of Evidence" to be grouped together. A case file can have N "Groups of evidence".
  • Hash: Hashing is the process of scrambling raw information to the extent that it cannot reproduce it back to its original form. It takes a piece of information and passes it through a function that performs mathematical operations on the plaintext. This function is called the hash function, and the output is called the hash value/digest.
  • SHA256: SHA 256 is a part of the SHA 2 family of algorithms, where SHA stands for Secure Hash Algorithm. The significance of the 256 in the name stands for the final hash digest value, i.e. irrespective of the size of plaintext/cleartext, the hash value will always be 256 bits.

Evidence manager

The first Legal Service, as we have said, is the Evidence Manager. Through this service you can timestamp any type of digital file (images, videos, files, etc.).

The Evidence follows a hierarchy:

Complete version:

  • Evidences can be within an Evidence group, and there can be N Evidences in an Evidence Group.
  • And in turn, an Evidence Group can be in a Case file, and a Case file can have N Evidence Groups.

Simplified version:

  • Evidence is created without Evidence group or Case file.
  • Therefore, the Case file > Evidence group > Evidence docking disappears.

Types of Evidences:

Complete version:

  • The type of Evidence is inferred from the Evidence group. Therefore, when creating the Evidence group you will have to indicate the Type of evidence it will have: FILE, PHOTO, VIDEO, WEB_PLUGIN

Simplified version:

  • The type of Evidence is assigned when creating the Evidence itself. The types it accepts are any mime-type.

Metadata

All three entities (Case file, Evidence group and Evidence) accept metadata. This value will be optional and any key-value can be inserted.

Hash

At the time of creation of the Evidence, its hash (SHA256) has to be sent. This value is essential and will be the SHA of the file that will later be uploaded. If this hash were not correct, the Evidence would not be completed because it is verified on the Evidence Manager.

Testimony

Legal App Factory offers two types of testifier: TSP and DLT. Each tenant will have its testifiers configured by default. When creating Evidence, you can specify which timestampers you want to testify through. If not specified, those of that tenant will be taken by default.

Completion of an Evidence

An Evidence will be considered complete once all the timestampers that have been configured for said Evidence have been processed correctly and if the Custody type is Internal, when the file is uploaded.

Custody type

The Evidence Manager has two types of file custody: Internal and External. This will be defined in the creation of the Evidence. If the custody is Internal, the creation request will respond with a link to which the file will have to be uploaded. If the custody is Internal, the Legal App Factory will have the file and it can be consulted. If the custody is External, the Legal App Factory will NOT have the file.