# Verification and Proofs Unbrowse is deliberately honest about what its proofs do and do not establish today. The short version: proofs today are local commitments, not third-party-verifiable attestations, and the system refuses to claim otherwise. ## What ships today Endpoint descriptors can carry proof metadata. The shipped proof type is a commitment: a SHA-256 commitment to a captured response body, signed locally by the publisher. The backend validates proof shape and rejects malformed proof objects. Trust is exposed as a four-state channel, not a binary badge: * **proven** reserved, never set today, it waits for real provenance * **client commitment** a local commitment exists (shown as a cautious state, not a green check) * **unverified proof** a proof is present but could not be verified * **no proof** nothing attached The marketplace's verified count deliberately excludes local commitments, so the strong signal stays dark until something stronger than self-attestation ships. A proof-required filter returns empty today, by design. This is the system telling the truth rather than lighting a badge it has not earned. ## What is not shipped, and not overclaimed Third-party notarised proofs (MPC notary handshakes, WASM verifiers), selective disclosure, and full cryptographic route-verification are research direction, not current behaviour. Stronger provenance, including zero-knowledge approaches to proving a route returned what it claims without exposing the underlying response, is part of an ongoing security and verification effort. It is described here as direction, and the docs will not claim it as shipped until it is. ## The security work behind this The proof-metadata model, the four-state trust channel, the trust-channel boundary for downstream consumers, and the discipline of not lighting a Verified badge until provenance is real are part of security and verification work led by Goh Ee Sheng. The conservative posture is the point: a trust system that overstates itself is worse than one that is honest about its current limits. For how this connects to economic accountability, see [Trust and Accountability](/concepts/trust-and-accountability.md) and [Accountable Bonding and Where FDRY Fits](/concepts/accountable-bonding.md). --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.unbrowse.ai/concepts/verification-and-proofs.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.