Infrastructure · Primitives

Sign

Attest to authorship or agreement

Definition

Mechanism

The Act of attaching a verifiable Identity proof to an Artifact, asserting authorship, approval, or agreement. Unlike a raw Signal, a Sign action creates a link between the entity and the data that a third party can verify without the entity's cooperation. Used to validate contracts or authorize actions.

Invariants

  1. Binds the signing Identity to the Artifact.
  2. Verifiable by a third party without the signer's cooperation.
  3. Invalidates if the Artifact changes.

Risks

Failure modes

  1. Legitimate retraction

    a signature is permanent, so a signer who changes their mind cannot unsign.

  2. Brittle integrity

    a typo fix invalidates the signature along with the substantive change.

  3. Legal gap

    technical non-repudiation is not legal non-repudiation, which has separate requirements.

Relationships

Builds on

Accepts

Composes with

Act

Root primitive for state modification

References

Signal

Raw information emission

Used by

References

AuditTrail

Immutable append-only log of agent actions for compliance and debugging

Contract

Binding agreement between parties

Composes with

Society

Award

Acceptance of bid and contract creation

Reference

Signature

  • Act(Identity)

Identity

Ref
Sign#b202
Sema ID
sema:Sign#mh:SHA-256:b2020447ec4c2725a139c6117c764cf464643e6e83379e86263267f95e4965ee
Ring
1
Tier
1
Updated
2026-11-11
Supersedes
  • sema:Sign#mh:SHA-256:1fb991fd538b93a9e2566b3f2a4c69f67a6b101d0577d911f50a4e194c1dc6ba
  • sema:Sign#mh:SHA-256:d89a18b44321e4b9ba9aada7ac698f69ef9f24a2b0d92e0906168554604a301c