See it live: the Evidence Replay player is independent verification in action — it re-derives the SHA3-384 over each run's RFC-8785 canonical trace in your browser (the same check a third party runs offline) and refuses to replay a trace it cannot re-verify.
How something becomes independently trusted: an independent verifier checks an immutable artifact it did not produce, and yields a deterministic, reproducible verdict — with no vendor in the path.
Verification is how something becomes independently trusted: an actor checks an immutable artifact and yields a result, with trust flowing only toward greater certainty. The artifact is fixed before it is checked; the verifier adds nothing to it and takes nothing on faith.
Verification has two real kinds — independent verification (the trust property: no vendor in the path, download–run–reproduce) resting on deterministic verification (the mechanism: the same proof yields the same verdict). Independence rests on determinism: a verdict can only be vendor-free if anyone re-running it reaches the same answer.
A passing verdict attests exactly three things, and stops there:
| PASS attests | PASS does not attest |
|---|---|
| the artifact reproduces byte-for-byte | that the system is secure |
| its post-quantum signatures validate (all families) | that the decision was correct, wise, or fair |
| its replay reconstructs what happened | that the environment is compliant or lawful |
Verification checks an artifact against itself and against fixed cryptographic and schema rules. It never judges whether a decision was wise, correct, fair, lawful, or compliant — that is not a defect, it is the boundary that makes an independent verdict meaningful.
Protocol stability freezes the schemas, error namespaces, and replay-integrity classification, so a verdict is reproducible across implementations and over time. It guarantees the ability to reproduce — not the correctness of any single replay.
Verification consumes governance replay: the frozen evidence is re-executed to reconstruct exactly what happened, so a third party can confirm the decision without trusting the vendor.
The strongest property of verification is that it works with the vendor absent. You download the artifact and the verifier, run it, and reproduce the verdict; H33 is not contacted. If H33 is offline, sanctioned, acquired, or sunset, verification still succeeds — certainty rests in the artifact’s bytes and a conformance-attested verifier, never an H33 service.
The verifier is not trusted because H33 says so: it is conformance-attested against public vectors, so it is not verifying its own output. A post-quantum attestation is checked across three signature families, and all three must validate (an AND-gate — the attestation is only as strong as every family combined):
| Family | Parameter | Standard status |
|---|---|---|
| ML-DSA | ML-DSA-65 | NIST FIPS 204 (finalized) |
| SLH-DSA | SLH-DSA-SHA2-128f | NIST FIPS 205 (finalized) |
| FALCON | FALCON-512 | not yet a finalized FIPS signature (FN-DSA / FIPS 206 draft) |
Verification does not create a parallel artifact class. Proofs resolve into the existing H33-74 / PQ-Verified attestation objects; a ZK proof is a witness feeding into them. Those objects are anchored by H33-74 — anchoring is a producer property Verification reads, not one it performs. The direction is acyclic:
verifier VERIFIES artifact → artifact PROVES claim
Because the arrow only points one way, a verifier never verifies its own output, and a claim is never trusted except through an artifact an independent verifier has checked.
Verification is a thin, product-independent capability. Consumers do not implement it — they use the same reference verifier to have their artifacts independently checked:
| Consumer | Relationship | What is verified |
|---|---|---|
| Agent-008 | VERIFIED_BY | the Provable Authority Package — that an action was authorized |
| HATS | VERIFIED_BY | the evidence record — that controls operated as declared |
| APQC (Verify phase) | VERIFIED_BY | a converted estate — independent of whoever executed the change |
| Authority Center | VERIFIED_BY | preserved authority state — that it still holds |
In each case the performer of verification is external and the same: none of these products verifies itself.
Verification is the capability; the verifier is the actor that performs it. The reference actor is h33-verifier — a small, conformance-attested tool you run yourself. It VERIFIES an artifact and yields a verification result; it is not the artifact, and it is not the claim.
See how verification proves your environment — download an artifact and reproduce the verdict yourself, or start an evaluation.
See verification prove an environmentVerification does not create what it checks. The artifact is produced and anchored by H33-74; verification reads it.
Verification does not decide whether an action was authorized. Agent-008 governs; verification checks the resulting proof.
Verification does not watch a running system. HATS monitors and emits the evidence record.
Verification does not make a claim true — the artifact does. A verdict only confirms the artifact holds up.
A passing verdict is not a security, correctness, or compliance guarantee — only that the artifact reproduces and its signatures validate.
Verification does render an independent, deterministic, reproducible verdict on an immutable artifact — with no vendor in the path.