Security overview

The document has to hold up without us.

A completed Signitri document verifies in Adobe Acrobat and with OpenSSL, offline, with Signitri nowhere in the picture. An artifact that needs the vendor alive to be checked is not evidence.

PAdES B-LTA · ETSI EN 319 142RFC 3161 timestamps The signing service never sees the document
The signature

Still checkable when the certificates behind it have expired.

Signitri produces PAdES B-LTA, the long-term validation profile of ETSI EN 319 142. The material needed to validate the signature travels inside the document, so a contract signed today does not become unverifiable when a certificate reaches the end of its life.

PAdES B-LTA

ETSI EN 319 142, the long-term validation profile. Revocation data and validation timestamps are embedded in the file rather than fetched from a server you have to be able to reach.

RFC 3161 timestamps

Issued by a public timestamp authority whose root is in the Adobe Approved Trust List. The time attached to a signature comes from a third party, not from us, and that is the point.

Incremental updates only

Signing appends a revision. It never rewrites a byte that an earlier signature covered, so every signature already on the document stays valid when the next person signs.

Independent verification

Check it on a machine with no network.

Open a completed document in Adobe Acrobat and it reports the signature, the certificate and the time. Run the same file through OpenSSL on a disconnected machine and you get the same answer. Signitri is not consulted, and does not need to still exist.

This is the reason the format was chosen. A verification that depends on a vendor API is a verification of the vendor.

What a verifier checks

All of it, without calling Signitri

Byte range digestmatches the signed bytes
CMS signaturevalidates against the signer certificate
Timestamp tokenRFC 3161, third-party time
Certificate chainresolves to a trusted root
Later revisionspresent, none altering signed bytes
Key handling

The service that holds the key has never held your document.

Signing runs against the signed attributes, not against the file. The PDF is assembled, hashed and finished in the browser, and the signing service sees a few hundred bytes of DER.

01

In the browser

Your browser hashes the document and assembles the CMS signed attributes.

02

On the wire

Only the DER encoding of those attributes is sent. It carries the digest of the document, not the document.

03

Back in the browser

The signature returns and is written into the PDF as an incremental update. The file never left.

A compromise of the signing service would be a serious event. It would not be a document breach, because the documents were never there.

Implementation

The PDF and cryptographic layer is our own code, end to end.

DEFLATE through CMS is written and maintained by Signitri, with no third-party dependencies. That is a deliberate cost, paid for one reason: the part of the system that decides whether a signature is valid carries no inherited supply-chain surface.

It also means the defects are ours. There is no independent review of this layer to point at yet, and the section below says so plainly.

Written here, not imported

Every layer between the file and the signature

DEFLATEcompression and decompression
PDF object modelparser and writer
Incremental updatesappend-only revision writer
ASN.1 / DERencoder
CMS (PKCS #7)signature container
PAdES B-LTAlong-term validation profile
What is kept

The evidence, and the data behind it.

The evidence pack

Sealed the moment the last person signs. The hash is printed in the pack, so a third party can confirm that the file they were handed is the file that was signed.

Signed PDFfinal, sealed
Audit logevery event, times in UTC
Verification resultsper signer
SHA-256 hashof the signed file
Certificate and timestampas embedded

The data we hold about signers

A government photo ID and a selfie are the highest-value data Signitri holds, and they are treated as such.

  • The ID image and the selfie are used for the identity check — OCR extraction, ID number validation, liveness, face match, and the cross-check through ThisIsMe — and for the verification record that sits in the evidence pack.
  • The verification result for each signer, including what matched and what a reviewer decided, is part of the audit record and is retained with the document.
  • The selfie is never placed on the document.

The retention period for ID images and selfies is being finalized with counsel and is not published yet. We would rather say that than publish a schedule we have to walk back. Ask, and you will be told exactly where it stands. What is already settled is written in the privacy notice and thesubprocessor list.

Limits

What we do not claim.

Overclaiming about identity is the one thing that would make this product worthless, so the boundary is stated here rather than discovered later.

Signitri is not a certificate authority.

We are not an accredited certificate authority, we do not issue qualified certificates, and we are not a qualified trust service provider under eIDAS. Whether a particular signature counts as advanced or qualified in a particular jurisdiction is a legal question, and it is not one we answer for you.

Verification reduces impersonation. It does not eliminate it.

A liveness check and a face match against a government photo ID are strong evidence that the person who signed is the person on that ID. They are not proof. No identity check is, and the ones that say otherwise are describing something they cannot deliver.

A verified signer is not a verified authority.

Verification establishes who signed. It does not establish that they were entitled to bind the company they signed for, or that they understood what they signed. Those remain questions for you and your counsel.

Signature law varies by jurisdiction and by document.

Electronic signature is recognized under ESIGN, UETA and eIDAS, but the effect of any given signature depends on where it is made and what kind of instrument it is. Wills, some property transfers and certain family-law instruments are excluded in many places. This page is not legal advice.

There is no third-party audit to point at yet.

Signitri holds no SOC 2 report and no ISO 27001 certificate, and the PDF and cryptographic layer has not been reviewed by an independent party. When that changes it will be stated here, with the date and the scope of the work.

Owning the code means the defects are ours.

Writing the cryptographic layer ourselves removes the supply chain, not the possibility of a bug. It removes the upstream maintainer standing between a defect and its fix.

For your review

The questions to ask, and where each one stands.

Some of these are answered above. Some are answered on request. Some are not settled, and they are marked that way here rather than left for you to find out during procurement.

Which signature profile do you produce, and does it survive certificate expiry?PAdES B-LTA, ETSI EN 319 142. Validation material and timestamps travel inside the document.
Answered
Can a completed document be verified without Signitri, offline?Yes. Adobe Acrobat and OpenSSL both do it with no network and no call to us.
Answered
Does the signing service ever hold the document?No. It receives the DER of the CMS signed attributes and returns a signature.
Answered
Which timestamp authority signs the RFC 3161 tokens?A public authority whose root is in the Adobe Approved Trust List. We name it on request, and you can check the root yourself.
On request
Where is signer data stored, and which subprocessors touch it?The current list is published on the subprocessor page, alongside the privacy notice.
Answered
How long are government ID images and selfies retained, and what deletes them?The retention period is being set with counsel. No number is published, because a published number would have to be one we can hold to.
Not settled
Do you hold SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001?No. Neither is in place, and neither is claimed anywhere on this site.
Answered
Has the PDF and cryptographic layer been independently reviewed?Not yet, and none is scheduled. Ask for the current position before you rely on one.
Not settled
Is there a written commitment covering your data if Signitri stops operating?Not yet. Documents already signed keep verifying without us, which is structural rather than contractual — the contractual half is still being drafted.
Not settled
Can we run our own verification against a real signed document?Yes. Ask and you will get a completed document and its evidence pack to put through your own tooling.
On request
Who do we contact about a vulnerability?hello@signitri.com. Include enough detail to reproduce the issue. A published response-time commitment is not in place yet.
Answered

This page was last reviewed on 29 July 2026.

Send us your security questionnaire.

It comes back answered in full, including the questions above that are still open. If you would rather test than read, ask for a completed document and put it through your own verification tooling.