Anyone can verify. No one can quietly rewrite the record.

• • Every recording is fingerprinted with SHA-256 at the moment of sealing, alongside its byte size, duration, MIME type, and a server-issued UTC timestamp.
• • The fingerprint and timestamp appear on the family's Legacy Certificate and are the same values partners see through the API.
• • The uploaded file itself is stored in a private storage bucket. Playback is only served to authorized viewers; the SHA-256 seal is public so anyone can verify the file has not changed a byte.

You never need Everlasting software installed to prove a recording is the sealed original. Compute the digest with a standard command-line tool and compare it to what the certificate (or the API) reports.

# macOS / Linux
shasum -a 256 recording.mp4

# Windows (PowerShell)
Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 recording.mp4

Paste the hex digest into the public verifier at /verify or call GET /api/public/verify/{sha256}. The response returns whether the seal is on file, its UTC seal timestamp, and the byte size at time of sealing. No login and no partner key required.

Every partner API request — successful reads, denied attempts, and errors — is written to a SHA-256 hash chain. Each new entry embeds the hash of the previous entry, so silently changing or deleting a past event would break every hash after it. The chain can be independently re-computed from the stored fields and re-verified end to end.

• • Funeral home partners can review their own access events inside the portal at /funeral-portal/compliance.
• • Insurance carriers and attorneys can request their own SHA-256-sealed access history alongside API access.
• • Everlasting administrators can re-verify the full chain and provide the current tip hash and total event count on request.

• • Each entry records: the partner and API key that made the call, the action, the target (a recording SHA-256 or an inquiry ID), the request IP and user-agent, the result (ok / not_found / unauthorized / forbidden / error) with HTTP status, a UTC timestamp, and the chained event hash.
• • Recording bytes and family-provided personal messages are never written into access-log metadata. Only the fingerprints and identifiers needed to prove access happened are stored.

Everlasting operates the sealing, verification, and audit-log infrastructure described above. Partner organizations are responsible for protecting their API keys, keeping their staff roster current, and following their own internal policies for handling family-provided content. Families remain the source of truth for the underlying wishes; Everlasting's role is to make those wishes independently verifiable and harder to dispute.