A Cloud-Based Service for Digitally Certifying Online Content

The paper presents a cloud-based prototype service for digitally signing online-available content. This is a functionality that can be incorporated within particular online scenarios in which the processed information needs to be traceable and proved genuine. The solution for the digital certification of (text-type) contents available online (OCC) consists of two elements that complement each other: the Portal which represents a web interface through which users interact with the system and the Portal. API which implements the actual logic ensuring the necessary functionalities. Given the existence of a set of microservices that expose certain basic functionalities, the Portal.API component will use them (by transmitting operation request events and consuming response events through the central communication component - which is a Kafka-based event bus), thus becoming independent of their implementation. With this approach, the established functionalities are decomposed into smaller functionalities, already exposed by microservices in the cloud-based middleware architecture, and so, the Portal.API has the exclusive role of using and integrating them. Next, the most important UML diagrams associated with the Portal.API component will be presented. They contain the logic on which the certification service for content available online is based.