Knowledge Base

Overview

Offline verification means checking a Truestamp proof bundle using only its own contents, with no call to any Truestamp server: recompute the subject hash with domain-separated SHA-256, walk the Merkle inclusion proof up to the block’s Merkle root, derive the block hash, walk each epoch proof up to the committed epoch root, and verify the Ed25519 signature over the signed payload. The only step that touches a network is confirming that the commitment transactions actually exist on Stellar or Bitcoin, and it is optional: run with the offline flag (skip_external) and those checks report as skipped rather than failed. Truestamp’s own verifier also skips them, whatever the flag says, for a bundle that has failed any step, and it examines nothing at all past the signature for a bundle whose key is not Truestamp’s or whose signature is invalid. An independent verifier may run without Truestamp’s keyring; it then reports that the signature verified against the key the bundle carries and that the key was not matched to one Truestamp published. The step-by-step walk is in verify a proof, and the fields it consumes are defined in the proof bundle wire format.