Verification: checking a record without an account

The signal ladder

Not every check establishes the same thing, and collapsing them into one green tick would be the easiest way to make the whole exercise worthless. In descending order of strength:

1. Hash the file yourself

Compute the SHA-256 of the file in your hand and compare it to the digest on the record. This needs no account, no API call and no trust in Wakemark — the arithmetic is the same everywhere. It establishes that the bytes are identical to the ones recorded at write time.

2. Validate the embedded C2PA manifest

Where the generating provider embedded Content Credentials, they can be validated against the signer's certificate independently of Wakemark, using any C2PA-capable tool. This is the strongest claim about who produced the file, and it comes from the provider, not from us.

3. Look the record up

Given an asset id, the record itself — digest, provider, model, timestamps, C2PA state, and the provenance chain — can be read back and compared. This one does depend on Wakemark being honest about its own ledger, which is why it sits below the two checks that do not.

What a public lookup returns

A public record is redacted server-side to non-sensitive provenance fields. It carries no prompt, no signed URLs, no storage keys, and no account details, and an unknown id returns the same uniform response as one that has been purged — a stale id is indistinguishable from a never-existent one, so the endpoint cannot be used to enumerate what exists.

Verification after a purge

The digest outlives the bytes. When retention deletes an asset, the tombstone keeps its id, its SHA-256 and its size, so a file somebody downloaded a year ago can still be checked against the record long after Wakemark stopped holding a copy. That is the useful half of a tombstone: what was deleted is the content, not the ability to verify it.

What verification cannot do

• It cannot tell you anything about a file that never passed through Wakemark. There is no record to check.
• It cannot prove a file is AI-generated in general. It can show that a specific generation request produced these exact bytes.
• It cannot resurrect a mark the provider never embedded. Where no manifest exists, the honest answer is none — and where nothing inspected the file, the honest answer is not_inspected, which is not the same thing.