What Epistemic Vault Verification Means

Audience: Public / customers / integrators Purpose: Clear expectations; prevent misrepresentation

Verification in one sentence

Epistemic Vault does not tell you what to believe. It tells you whether a media file has been altered relative to its cryptographic provenance.

What “Verified” means (cryptographically)

When Epistemic Vault verifies an asset, it checks that the file matches its provenance records. Depending on the capture format and policy, this typically includes:

• Recomputing hashes from the stored bytes (not trusting client-supplied hashes)
• Verifying embedded signatures where present
• Rebuilding Merkle structures (for chunked verification) and comparing roots
• Checking that provenance metadata is internally consistent
• Evaluating device integrity signals and applying trust-tier policy thresholds

If these checks succeed, the Vault can produce a Verification Receipt and a Proof Bundle that can often be validated later (including offline, depending on the bundle contents and available trust roots).

What “Verified” does not mean

A verified asset is not a guarantee of:

• Factual truth of the event depicted
• Absence of staging, coercion, or deception prior to capture
• Ethical or lawful recording practices
• Court admissibility in any jurisdiction
• Accuracy of context, narrative framing, or completeness
• Accuracy of GPS/time beyond what the device reported at capture time

Cryptographic integrity is not semantic truth.

Why this distinction matters

A video can be:

• perfectly untampered since capture, and
• still misleading (through framing, omission, or staging).

Epistemic Vault is designed to keep provenance objective and repeatable by focusing on cryptographic properties rather than subjective “truth scoring.”

What verification is meant to answer

Epistemic Vault is designed to answer questions like:

• Has this file been changed since it was captured?
• Does this file still match the original capture hash chain / signature?
• Was this captured on a device meeting a defined integrity threshold at the time of capture?

Verification works best when combined with:

• corroboration (other sources, witness testimony, additional media),
• investigation (timeline checks, geo checks, provenance continuity), and
• human judgment.

Common misstatements to avoid

Please do not claim:

• “Epistemic Vault verified this event happened.”
• “Verified means legally admissible.”
• “Verified means not staged.”
• “Verified means the metadata must be true.”

Instead, you can say:

• “Epistemic Vault verified that this file has not been altered relative to its cryptographic provenance.”

In plain language

Verification protects the file’s integrity. It does not validate the world.