Digital certificate for online notary: what the seal and certificate actually prove

On paper, a notary uses a stamp or embosser. In an electronic notarization, the equivalent is the digital seal: an image placed on the notarial certificate that carries the information the commissioning state requires, typically the notary's name, the words "Notary Public", the state, and often the commission number and expiration date.

The seal image is what a human reader sees. On its own, an image proves very little, because an image can be copied onto any page. That is why the law pairs it with something that cannot be copied: the digital certificate.

A digital certificate is a cryptographic credential issued to the notary by a certificate authority. It contains the notary's identity and a public key, and the notary alone controls the matching private key. When the notary completes the act, the platform uses the private key to create a digital signature over the exact contents of the PDF.

Most state laws on electronic notarization require that the notary's electronic signature and seal be attached to the document in a way that makes any later change evident. A digital signature based on a certificate does exactly that.

Who sealed the document:

the signature is tied to the notary named in the certificate.

That the document has not changed:

the signature covers the document's exact contents, so changing a single character after sealing breaks it.

When it was sealed:

a trusted timestamp records the time of signing, so the signature can be checked even after the certificate expires.

What it does not prove on its own is that the signer was who they said they were, or that they signed willingly. Those facts come from the notarial act itself: the identity checks, the notary's observation on video and the recording. That is why the audit trail matters as much as the certificate.

You do not need special software to check an electronically notarized PDF.

1. 1 Open the PDF in a standard reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader.
2. 2 Open the signature panel. It lists each digital signature on the document.
3. 3 Check that the notary's signature is valid and that the document has not been modified since it was signed.
4. 4 Check the certificate details: the name of the notary and the issuing certificate authority.
5. 5 Compare the SHA-256 fingerprint of your file with the fingerprint recorded in the audit trail. If they match, you hold the same file that was sealed.

If a reader shows the signature as valid but warns that the certificate is not trusted, it usually means the reader does not include that certificate authority in its trust list. The document can still be verified against the audit trail.

Notary certificates expire, often together with the notary's commission. A document sealed while the certificate was valid stays valid. Long-term validation data and a trusted timestamp, embedded at the time of sealing, let a reader confirm years later that the certificate was valid at the moment of signing.

Every sealed document on ENotary carries the notary's digital seal and a digital signature from the notary's certificate, with a trusted timestamp. The audit trail records the SHA-256 fingerprint of the document before and after sealing, and the whole record can be exported as PDF, or as PDF and JSON on Business and above. Read more on electronic notary, digital notary services and the notarization audit trail.