Most people never think about what happens to a PDF after it's signed. It sits in your downloads, gets emailed to a lawyer, forwarded to a bank. Weeks later, if there's a dispute, the question becomes: is this the same file that was signed, or could it have been edited?
A tamper-sealed PDF answers that question. Every signing on EZ PDF Editor — whether it's a Video Signing Room session or a regular send-out for e-signature — now produces a sealed file with a Certificate of Signing & Seal page built into it.
What is a tamper-sealed PDF?
When the last signature goes on, the service appends a certificate page to the document and locks it with a cryptographic fingerprint. Think of the fingerprint as a unique digital thumbprint of the exact file contents. If even one word, one signature, or one page is changed afterwards, the fingerprint no longer matches — and that is detectable in seconds.
The seal is tamper-evident: it doesn't try to hide from editing, it makes editing obvious.
What's on the Certificate of Signing & Seal page
Open the last page of any sealed PDF and you'll find a plain-language record, all in one place:
- The document and session — what was signed, the session name and reference, and who hosted it.
- Every signer — name, email, status, the exact date and time they signed, their time zone, the IP address, and their declared city and province.
- Identity verification — which guests were ID-verified, and any host notes.
- The full audit timeline — session created, guests invited, consent given, joined, signed, sealed — each with who, when, and from where.
- A SHA-256 content digest — the fingerprint of the signed content, printed right on the page.
That single page is the evidence pack for the document, and it travels inside the file itself — you can't lose it in a separate folder.
How the seal works (without the jargon)
A hash function reads the entire file and produces a fixed-length fingerprint. Any change to the file — even a single character — produces a completely different fingerprint. The moment a document is sealed:
- The signed content is fingerprinted and that digest is printed on the certificate page.
- The sealed file's own fingerprint is stored on the session record and written to the audit trail as a sealed event.
Nobody can compute a "new" valid seal for an edited file, because the stored fingerprint lives on the record — not inside the document being edited.
How to verify a copy in seconds
You don't need any software. Open ezpdfeditor.aicanadiansolutions.ca/seal, upload any copy of a signed PDF, and it compares the file to the seal on record:
- ✅ Seal verified — this is the unmodified, sealed original, with the full signer summary shown.
- ⚠ Not on record — either the file was modified after sealing, or it wasn't sealed by us. Either way you know immediately.
That makes it practical for a lawyer or bank to check a file you send them — no account required on their side.
What a verified seal means for you
For notaries, lawyers, real estate agents and anyone handling high-stakes paperwork, an electronic signature is legally binding on its own — under the U.S. ESIGN Act and UETA, the EU's eIDAS, and Canada's PIPEDA and provincial evidence legislation. What a seal adds is provability: when someone asks “is this the original signed copy?” you don't have to take anyone's word for it — you verify it.
Good practice: keep the sealed PDF and, if it matters to you, the Audit Report. Store them where you'd keep any important record.
Sign and seal your next document
Every completed signing on EZ PDF Editor is sealed automatically. Try the free editor, or host a live signing in the Video Signing Room.
Start signing →The short version
A tamper-sealed PDF is a signed document with an on-board certificate page and a cryptographic fingerprint stored on the record. Any copy can be verified at /seal in seconds — match means it's the authentic original, mismatch means it's been altered. It's automatic on every signing, free to verify, and it turns “trust me, it's the original” into “check it yourself.”