Certificate, audit trail and seal
What you hold if someone disputes it.
A signed document is worth what you can prove about it. Galilei Sign produces three layers of evidence, and it pays to know what each one does — and what none of them does.
What happens when the last person signs
- Signatures, names, dates, text and checkboxes are stamped onto the original PDF.
- The Audit Certificate is generated and appended to the end of the document.
- The PDF is cryptographically sealed.
- It is emailed to every party; if it is too heavy to attach, it goes as a download link.
The chained audit trail
Every action — created, sent, delivered, opened, consent accepted, field completed, signed, reminded, sealed, downloaded — stores a digital fingerprint that includes the fingerprint of the previous action. Altering a row after the fact breaks the whole chain, and the document says so out loud: «Record intact» or «The record was altered».
That table takes no updates and no deletes. Ever, not even from the inside.
The Audit Certificate
It is a PDF of its own, downloadable separately, with the document identifier, the fingerprint of the original and of the final file, and for each signer: name, email, IP, device, how they adopted their signature, and the timestamps of send, delivery, open, consent and signature. Below that, the full event table.
It is the document you send when someone asks how they can know it was really them.
The seal, with its limit said to your face
The final PDF is cryptographically signed with the platform certificate and carries a timestamp from an external authority. The practical consequence is strong: any later alteration of the file invalidates the signature and is detectable in any PDF reader. That is a property of the file, not a promise from us.
And now the part almost no vendor tells you. Our certificate is our own; it is not on the trust list Adobe ships with. Opening the PDF, Adobe Reader will say it is signed and the signatures are valid, but that the signer's identity is unknown: a yellow notice, never a green check.
That takes nothing away from its legal validity — the signature holds on consent, the audit trail and the certificate, not on the colour of an icon. But your client is going to see it, and it is far better that you explain it when you send it than that you explain it when they ask.