security

The cryptography, in plain language.

We built Authii so the security story is short enough to fit on this page, and so the worst-case version — us being breached or compelled — still leaves your documents private.

01
signatures

Your fingerprint, not a typed name.

Every signature is a WebAuthn assertion from a passkey on the signer's device — the same standard your bank uses for biometric login. The private key never leaves the signer's device. We never see it; you never type it. The signature is verifiable for the life of the elliptic curve.

02
encryption

Two modes. You pick per document.

Standard mode encrypts every document at rest with AES-256-GCM under a key we hold in HSM-backed storage. The default for most contracts.

End-to-end modegenerates a fresh key in your browser, wraps it under each recipient's passkey-derived public key (X25519), and uploads only ciphertext. Even with full access to our database, the document is unrecoverable without one of the recipients' passkeys.

03
sealing

The signed PDF stands alone.

When the last person signs, we bake every signature, every certificate, and every timestamp into the PDF as PAdES-LTV (Long-Term Validation). Adobe Acrobat or any compliant reader can verify it offline, in any year, without ever talking back to Authii. If we vanished tomorrow, your sealed contracts would still hold.

04
identity

Tiered assurance, clearly labelled.

Every signature carries an assurance level on its certificate: who proved what, when, and how. Email + passkey covers the everyday case. Government ID + selfie liveness raises a document to AES (Advanced Electronic Signature) under eIDAS. In-person notarial verificationtakes it to QES — equivalent to a wet signature in front of a notary public.

05
operations

Boring is a feature.

Postgres on a hardened VM. TLS terminating at Caddy. Strict CSP, HSTS, Permissions-Policy locking biometric APIs to the WebAuthn flow. Sessions stored server-side with 30-day rolling expiry. Email subjects sanitised against control-byte injection. Atomic challenge consumption against replay. We publish our incident response timeline on the about page.


AES-256-GCM

Document encryption at rest. NIST-recommended, FIPS-validated.

X25519 ECIES

Per-recipient key wrapping in E2EE mode. Curve25519, modern, audited.

WebAuthn / FIDO2

Signature primitive. P-256 ECDSA over the document hash.

HKDF-SHA-256

Key derivation everywhere we need to mix domain separation in.

PAdES-LTV

The sealed-PDF profile. Long-term verifiable, offline.

RFC 3161 TSA

Trusted timestamp on every seal. Future-proofs court admissibility.


found a vulnerability?

Tell us before they do.

Email security@authii.com with a description and (where possible) a proof of concept. Coordinated disclosure: 90 days standard, accelerated for actively-exploited issues. We don't pursue good-faith researchers under the CFAA or its UK equivalents.