Methodology
Veritas applies a structured, reproducible protocol to define geographic scopes, ingest environmental observations, and produce cryptographically verifiable records with bounded claims.
Scope Definition
A user defines a polygon boundary using the interactive globe interface. The polygon is registered in the Polygon Registry with a unique identifier, boundary hash, geometry hash, and version number. Each polygon represents a fixed spatial scope.
Signal Ingestion
Observation signals are fetched from configured providers (Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 optical, AIS vessel tracking, VIIRS fire confidence). Signals are filtered to the polygon boundary and observation window, then stored as immutable ObservationSignal records linked to the session.
Compilation
Selected signals are compiled into a canonical payload. The payload includes the polygon ID, evidence manifest (signal IDs and metadata), observation window, and system type. A SHA-256 canonical hash is computed over the normalized JSON.
Governance Evaluation
The compiled record passes through a policy engine that evaluates signal confidence, source sufficiency, and boundary integrity. The governance decision (PERMIT, ESCALATE, or REFUSE) is fingerprinted and permanently recorded.
Authority Signing
Records that pass governance are signed using Ed25519 with SHA-256. The private key is held by the VERITAS-SYSTEM authority. The public key is published for independent verification. Post-sign round-trip verification confirms the signature before persistence.
Persistence & Anchoring
The signed record is written to the VlmcRecord table with an immutable lock. A mint event is logged with the governance fingerprint, claims count, validation status, and duration. The record is now part of the permanent Veritas Registry.
Canonical Payload Schema
The canonical payload is a normalized JSON document validated against a strict Zod schema. Required fields include vlmc_id, issued_at, polygon_id, boundary_hash, evidence_manifest_hash, and metrics. All strings are NFC-normalized, keys are recursively sorted, and numbers are rounded to 4 decimal places to ensure deterministic hashing.
The SHA-256 hash of the canonical payload is stored as the compileSignature, and the Ed25519 signature over the same canonical bytes is stored as the authoritySignature. Verification re-runs canonicalStringify on the received payload and checks both hashes.
VLMC ID Format
Records are assigned sequential identifiers in the format VLMC-YYYY-NNNNNN where YYYY is the mint year and NNNNNN is a zero-padded sequence counter. The counter is atomically incremented in the database on each mint, ensuring uniqueness without duplicates.