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You have been handed an evidence pack and the kernel printed VERIFIED. This page tells you exactly what you may conclude from that, and what you may not. The limits are specified in evidence-bundle.md §5.3.4, which is the normative source. This page is the plain reading.

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What a verified pack proves

For every event in the pack:
  • The producer signed it. An Ed25519 signature over the envelope, checked against the public key embedded in the artifact.
  • The record matches its commitment, where the producer disclosed the bytes. The disclosed record hashes to the payload_hash the signature covers.
  • It was included in the witnessed set. An RFC 9162 inclusion proof from the event’s leaf to the Merkle root committed inside the signed stamp.
All of it offline, against keys and bytes inside the pack. No call to Sanning, and no account.

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What it does not claim

Four boundaries. A verified verdict is a narrower statement than it first reads as, and relying on the wider reading is how evidence gets over-trusted.
It is not completeness. A pack proves the events it carries were committed to that root. It says nothing about events the producer chose not to include. “Every step is here” is not a claim this artifact can make. If completeness matters to you, ask the producer what the pack covers and check that claim separately. It is not proof the chain was consulted. A verified verdict is offline and internally consistent, and it names a witness. Confirming that the witness actually holds those bytes is a separate, online act. Run the kernel with a gateway to do it, or fetch the transaction yourself. It is not identity. The envelope carries a public key, and a key is not a person. Binding a key to an organisation happens out of band. Producer identity informs a reader; it never gates verification. It is not a statement about a per-agent slice. A stamp covers an interval across a whole organisation. The pack carries only its own events, so it cannot tell you what else that organisation anchored in the same interval.

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What a failure means

If the kernel prints FAILED, it names the record that broke and why. The pack itself carries an asserted verdict from whoever produced it, and the kernel throws that away and recomputes. Where the two disagree, the recomputed answer wins and the output says so:
That is the property worth understanding. You are not reading the producer’s claim about their own evidence. You are reading your own machine’s answer.

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What “undetermined” means

A pack can verify while leaving some things unknown, and the kernel distinguishes that from failure on purpose. Absent evidence is reported as absent, never as failure. If a producer withheld the bytes for a record, its content binding is undetermined. That is a producer exercising minimum disclosure, not a defect, and treating it as tampering would be wrong.

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Verify at the command line

The two commands, and what each exit code means.