Verification

To prove data provenance to a third-party Verifier, the Prover provides the following information:

  • Session Header signed by the Notary
  • opening to the plaintext commitment
  • TLS-specific data which uniquely identifies the server
  • identity of the server

The Verifier performs the following verification steps:

  • verifies that the opening corresponds to the commitment in the Session Header
  • verifies that the TLS-specific data corresponds to the commitment in the Session Header
  • verifies the identity of the server against TLS-specific data

Next, the Verifier parses the opening with an application-specific parser (e.g. HTTP or JSON) to get the final output. Since the Prover is allowed to selectively disclose the data, that data which was not disclosed by the Prover will appear to the Verifier as redacted.

Below is an example of a verification output for an HTTP 1.1 request and response. Note that since the Prover chose not to disclose some sensitive information like their HTTP session token and address, that information will be withheld from the Verifier and will appear to him as redacted (in red).

Verification example