About Notary Receipts

Notary receipts contain a verifiable notarization of signatures on a document.

When you sign a document before the notary, a record of the event is made. This record is called the 'certificate'. The certificate is then signed by the notary, indicating that the notary attests to the authenticity of the signatures. This signature is called the 'notarization'.

The original document, the certificate and the notarization are stored in the notary receipt. The notary itself keeps a copy of the certificate and the notarization, but not the original document.

Receipt Commands

When you touch the receipt, you are given several options:

Read: Reads the basic information about the certificate: what was signed, by who, when and where.
Verify: Checks that the version of the document stored in the receipt is the version signed. Also checks that the certificate stored in the receipt is the one used in the notarization.

These two checks ensure that the integrity of the notary receipt has been preserved. See below for checking the veracity of the notarization.

Help: Gives you this note card.
Details: Recites the details of the certificate and the notarization. Note that these lines are formatted for both humans and computers. See below for a sample and how to read it.
E-Mail: E-mails the certificate and notarization to an e-mail account. The format is suitable for off-world verification. You will be asked to speak the e-mail address on a random private channel. Follow the spoken instructions from the notary receipt.
Document: Gives you a copy of the document that was signed.

Verifying the Notarization

The notarization can be verified at the notary. This will check that the notarization in the receipt was made properly before the notary.

Go the the notary, Nota Bene in Obscure (31,181,145), and go to the verify area. Rez the receipt onto the verify desk by dragging the receipt from your inventory onto the desk surface. The verify desk will take all the information from the receipt and verify the document, the certificate and the notarization.

By having the verify desk at the notary perform all these checks you are also making sure that the receipt object's scripting hasn't been tampered with.

If you really want to, you can perform all these verifications yourself off-world. To do this, you'll need to be somewhat tech-savvy. Instructions are in the technical details help card available at the notary.

Reading the Receipt Details

Here is a sample certificate and notarization:

service: Notary 1.0
document-title: Land Lease
document-digest: d5b281c4311e9a4480117e4d56b43406
signed-by: Amy Landowner as LandLord
time-stamp: 2005-09-03T20:37:19.335816Z
location: Thyris 13,189
fee-paid: L$100
notary-desk: NB-001-TEST
notary-agent: Zarf Vantongerloo
certificate-serial: 11
----
certificate-digest: ad9cb4a5002e0366f84634fe647532cc
certificate-signature: <<<
LwY4NuuUafqmDdLWFLSu7ziuEO/dTynkc8XCbpRpyl5p8p/BAzLM4E1OUiM9i3RZvwQ6T/v2t1wq
/LbV1aSFWA8FOFfNwsiba4arnNUv0JCM7gXv3LCHvUm2HpX8yufzGunADGbd1eJRHQzdLGcbQriQ
PwhSJ0TsPK+VaipI4aWlf5PrAuAHX1Hc57AgPTOBwmskP8ySlZep90shT046oymvMPD0ZiskSYE4
G4mqhYIUb4n9srREtBX9X+PVEfJ1NLAW3Ct+BAmrcJh16P9svm31HNDhrJEPhyW2IfwB/OBXQcyJ
//just+a+sample//Otn5EvWmH9jNDnck5m+7w==
>>>

The part before the dashed line is the certificate. The part below is the notarization. Each line has a key and a value, separated by a colon (':').

Important lines to understand are:

document-title: the name of the document signed
signed-by: there will be one of these for each signature it names the AV who signed, and the signature line signed (if any were in the document)
time-stamp: date and time when it was signed in Greenwich Mean Time, or the +0 hours time zone, also known as UTC the date and time are separated by a 'T' the time is in 24-hour clock format

Briefly, the other lines mean:

service: the notary protocol version number
document-digest: the cryptographic hash used to verify the document contents
location: where the notarization was made
fee-paid: how much money was charged for the notarization
notary-desk: which desk it was made it when the notary updates logs and keys, this value changes
notary-agent: the responsible notary AV
certificate-serial: the serial number of the notarization performed by the desk
certificate-digest: the cryptographic hash used to verify the certificate
certificate-signature: the cryptographic signature of the notary