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Every evidence claim on SignSealShip — on a room card, in a Closing Passport, on a verify page — uses exactly three words. The vocabulary is locked on purpose: evidence language that stretches is trust theater, and trust theater is the thing this platform exists to replace. The rule behind all three: never imply evidence that is not held.

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SEALED

SEALED means a cryptographically verifiable artifact exists and its hash is on record. When a document card shows SEALED, it links to the seal’s public verification page at /v/{verifyCode}. What stands behind that badge:
The document is sealed with an asymmetric signature whose private key never leaves Google Cloud KMS. It is a CMS/PKCS#7 signature visible in a standard PDF signature panel, with byte-range tamper evidence: change one byte after sealing and every verifier can tell.
An independent time-stamping authority attests, over the sealed document’s SHA-256, that those bytes existed at that moment. The token is archivable and independently verifiable — it is the authority’s word, not ours.
The sealed hash is submitted to public OpenTimestamps calendars, producing a detached .ots proof anyone can verify or upgrade with standard tooling. We describe it exactly as it is: pending until a Bitcoin block confirms it, anchored after. We never claim “anchored” before the chain does.
Every sealed document gets a 128-bit random verification code and a custody record: the pre-seal document hash, the post-seal hash, and when the seal happened. Possession of the code (or of the sealed file itself) is the authorization to see the record.
A freshly sealed document can briefly show SEALED without a verify link while its verification code is being generated. The badge is still earned — the artifact hash is on record — and the card points at the verification drop portal at signsealship.com/verify, where uploading the sealed file resolves its record.

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RECORDED

RECORDED means our systems logged that a milestone happened — a document finished signing, a package shipped — but no independent cryptographic artifact backs that specific claim. It is honest attestation, clearly labeled as attestation. This distinction runs through everything:
  • A room card shows RECORDED for a signed-but-not-yet-sealed document.
  • A Closing Passport labels every statusAtSnapshot as attestation, distinct from the hash fields beside it.
  • A RECORDED item never renders a verify link, because there is nothing independent to verify.
If you need a claim to survive scrutiny that does not extend to trusting SignSealShip, get it SEALED.

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No evidence yet

Pending items say “no evidence yet” in those words. Not a spinner, not a softened euphemism, not an empty space that invites assumption — an explicit statement that nothing is on record. Two related fail-safe rules:
  • Unknown statuses read as open. If a room encounters an order status it does not recognize, the document renders as open — never as complete. New states fail toward “less claimed”, not more.
  • Absence is stated, not padded. In a Closing Passport manifest, hash fields exist only when the artifact exists. A missing sealedSha256 key is the record that no seal exists.

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Verifying without trusting us

Every SEALED claim is checkable through channels SignSealShip does not control:
1

Open the sealed PDF in a signature viewer

The KMS signature and byte-range tamper evidence validate in a standard PDF signature panel, offline, with no SignSealShip involvement.
2

Check the public verify URL

/v/{verifyCode} (or /v/room/{verifyCode} for a Closing Passport) shows the custody record — hashes and seal time — with no account and no login.
3

Recompute the hashes yourself

SHA-256 the sealed file you hold and compare it to the recorded sealedSha256. For passports, re-canonicalize the manifest and re-hash it; the chain must recompute cleanly.
4

Verify the timestamps independently

The RFC 3161 token validates against the issuing authority; the OpenTimestamps proof validates against the Bitcoin blockchain with standard open-source tooling.
If SignSealShip disappeared tomorrow, every SEALED artifact would still verify. That is the bar the vocabulary is built around.

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Where the vocabulary appears

  • Room cards — each attached document carries exactly one badge. See Closing Rooms.
  • Closing Passports — hashes are evidence; statuses are labeled attestation; coverage is enumerated. See Closing Passport.
  • Verify pages — /v/{code} and /v/room/{code} show only what the record holds.
  • Webhook events — deliveries carry verify codes and hashes, never inflated claims. See the webhooks guide.