How a signature holds up
A signature is only worth what can be shown about it afterwards. This page is what ShareSign records, where it is printed, and how anyone can check it, on every plan, including the free one.
Legal standing
ShareSign provides simple electronic signatures under eIDAS and electronic signatures under ESIGN and UETA. Under those laws a signature is not denied effect only because it is electronic; what carries it is the evidence that a particular person meant to sign a particular document. That is what everything below exists to show. The legal effect of any one signature depends on the law that applies to your agreement, and some documents in some places call for a higher grade of signature or for a witness. ShareSign does not give legal advice; the terms say the same.
Before a signer’s first mark is recorded they confirm, in a sentence on the screen, that their electronic signature is the legal equivalent of their handwritten one, and they are told that the time, their network address and their device will be kept with the document. The signature itself is not recorded before that consent; that the document was opened is, so a sender can see it was read.
What is recorded
| The person | Name and email as the sender entered them, and the address the link was emailed to. A hand-off records both the person who passed it on and the person who signed. |
|---|---|
| The moment | The time of each event in UTC, to the second. |
| The connection | The network address and browser of every view and every signature. |
| The files | A SHA-256 hash of every original file at upload, and of the signed PDF at completion. |
| Every event | Created, sent, emailed, opened, reminded, signed, declined, passed on, address changed, completed, voided, expired, downloaded, deleted and restored, each with who did it. An agent that prepared a draft is named. |
The certificate of completion
When the last signer signs, the field values are drawn into the PDF, any fillable form fields in the original are flattened so the signed copy cannot be edited, and a certificate is appended as the final page of the same file. It travels with the document wherever it is emailed or downloaded. It states:
- The document’s title and its ShareSign document ID.
- The SHA-256 hash of each original file, so the file you uploaded can be matched to what was signed.
- When the document was completed, in UTC.
- For each recipient: name and email; for signers, the time they signed, their network address and their browser; for people copied, that they received a copy.
To check that a file on your disk is the original the certificate names, compute its hash and compare:
shasum -a 256 contract.pdf
The signed PDF’s own hash is recorded at completion and returned by the API, so a copy that has been altered after signing can be told from the one ShareSign produced.
The audit trail
Every event above is a row in an append-only table: the database itself refuses to update or delete a row, for us as much as for anyone. Each row carries a SHA-256 hash of the previous row’s hash together with its own contents, so the trail is a chain. Change one row, or remove one, and every hash after it stops matching; a break is detectable, and a trail that verifies is one that has not been touched since it was written.
The trail is shown on the document page as its activity, and returned by the API at GET /v1/documents/{id}/audit with each row’s hash, so you can keep a copy and verify it yourself. It can also be downloaded as a spreadsheet.
The audit trail as a spreadsheet
The trail can be downloaded as a CSV file that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, on every plan. For one document, use Download as CSV beside its activity. For every document between two days, up to a year at a time, an owner or admin uses Settings, Data. Deleted documents are left out, and taking the whole trail out is itself recorded in the workspace’s activity.
| One row per event | When it happened, the document, who did what in the same words as the document's page, the recipient's name and email, the network address and device, and any details such as a decline reason. |
|---|---|
| Times | In UTC, in a column that says so, so two people in two countries read the same instant. |
| Checkable | Each row carries its own hash and the hash of the row before it. Hold a row against the certificate, or recompute the chain, without asking us. |
| Names in any script | Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and the rest arrive in the spreadsheet as they were typed. |
| Safe to open | A name or a reason that begins with =, +, - or @ cannot run as a formula: it arrives as plain text. |
Links and access
| Signing links | A 184-bit random token, unique to one recipient. Rotated whenever a link is sent again, so an old copy dies. Useless once the document is complete, voided, declined or expired. |
|---|---|
| File links | Every download uses a link that expires within 15 minutes and is issued only to a party entitled to that file at that moment. Files are never public. |
| Who can see a document | Members of the workspace, by role, and the people it was sent to. Nobody else, including us, except for support you ask for. |
What is not here yet
ShareSign does not yet issue advanced (PAdES) signatures sealed with a hardware-backed key, or qualified electronic signatures through a qualified trust service provider. Both are planned. If your agreement requires one of them today, ShareSign is not the right tool for that document, and we would rather say so here than on the day it matters.
Where the data lives, how it is encrypted, and how long it is kept is on data and regions; the one-page summary with links to every underlying document is the trust page.
Last changed 19 September 2026. Something wrong here? Say so on the support page.