Help · For teachers & verifiers · Tier 4 — Trust & integrity

Sharing a recording with parents or admins

A Red Stet recording is the receipt that a piece of writing was done by the student — when, in what rhythm, with what edits. Sometimes you want that receipt in front of someone outside Red Stet: a parent at conferences, a department head, a college reviewer. Here's how to share a .red.md file, what the verifier shows, what it doesn't.

In this doc

When you'd share
Generating a .red.md file
What the verifier shows
What it deliberately doesn't show
How to interpret a verification
The signature chain & tampering
For parents — what you're looking at
For admins & college reviewers
Anonymizing & scrubbing
The .red.md is durable

When you'd share

Two situations, nearly opposite.

Showcase

Extraordinary work, and you want parents to see how: long sessions, painstaking revisions, the moment they cracked the argument open. A parent watching the rhythm chart catch their kid spending forty minutes on one paragraph sees what a grade can't communicate.

Investigation

A submission feels off. Voice doesn't match earlier work, or it appeared in three minutes with no revisions, or it shares structure with another. Hand a colleague or admin the file and let them form their own judgment.

For an investigation, share the recording before drawing a conclusion. A reviewer interpreting independently is more credible than one validating your verdict.

Parent Showcase

"Look how hard she worked — 4 sessions, eleven hours."

Admin / Dept head Investigation

"Watch the recording and tell me what you see."

College / scholarship Verification

"Proof the essay was written by the applicant. Drop the file into the verifier."

Generating a .red.md file .red.md

From the writing profile's Archive tab, download the .red.md for a submission. One Markdown file with the document body plus the full provenance bundle — session manifests, chained hashes, bundle seal, signed JWT attestation.

Plain text. Open in any editor; document at the top, trailing block:

<!-- red-stet:v1
{"provenanceBundle":{"manifests":[...],
"bundleSeal":"a7c2b9-...","bodyHash":"...",
"eventCount":8423,...},"author":"...",
"__signature__":"eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIs..."}
-->

/verify reads the block; the body above gets checked against the recorded hash. Edit either and verification fails.

Email it or save it

A few hundred KB. Attach to email, save to a drive, file with your integrity cases. Anyone with the file and the verifier can re-check.

The verifier doesn't phone home. Static page, runs in the recipient's browser. No account, no telemetry, file stays on their machine.

essay-on-orwell.red.md

42 KB · Body + 4 sessions + signature

One file. Essay body plus the full provenance trail.

What the verifier shows

Drop a .red.md into /verify: verdict, four integrity checks, summary metadata.

The verdict

Green check = "Verified — file integrity intact". Red triangle = "Failed — see flagged checks below".

The four checks

Bundle seal — bundle hashes to the export value. Edits to anything in the bundle fail this.
Session chain — every manifest's prevChainHead matches the previous chainHead. Removed or reordered sessions fail this.
Document body hash — text matches the recorded hash. Edited body fails this.
Manifest integrity — each chainHead matches its contents. Tampered fields fail this.

The summary

Body length, body hash, session count, event count, last chain head, bundle seal. Hashes let you compare against other copies forensically.

✓

Verified — file integrity intact

4 of 4 checks passed.

✓

Bundle seal

Provenance bundle is intact — none of the events, manifests, or metadata have been modified since export.

✓

Session chain

4 session manifests chain together end-to-end — no sessions were removed or altered.

✓

Document body hash

The document body in this file matches the hash recorded at export.

✓

Manifest integrity

All 4 session manifest chainHead values match their content.

Body length: 11,418 chars
Sessions: 4
Events: 8,423
Chain head: a7c2b9d-...

What it deliberately doesn't show

One submission's recording. Nothing else.

The verifier runs on the .red.md file alone. Other submissions, other classrooms, private teacher comments, the broader writing profile — none of it lives in the file.

Where this matters

A parent can't navigate from one essay to others. A college reviewer with one .red.md has one piece of evidence, not a backdoor into the applicant's academic history.

FERPA-safe by default. The teacher chose what to share by sharing one file; the verifier honors that choice.

What's shown

The document body
Student's display name (configurable)
Submission date
Session count and total writing time
The four integrity check results

How to interpret a verification

"Verified" doesn't mean "this student wrote this well." It means the recording came from a Red Stet pipeline and hasn't been edited since. Judgment about quality, originality, or appropriateness is still yours.

Green verdict — what it proves

Every event, session boundary, and chain link is consistent. Body matches the export hash. Whoever sat at the keyboard during those sessions produced what you're reading. Trust the chain of custody from account to student, and the work is the student's.

Green verdict — what it does NOT prove

That the student wasn't retyping from another text. That they understood it. That an AI output wasn't paraphrased in their head and then typed. The recording is process evidence: rhythm, pauses, revisions, time-on-task. Process evidence plus your knowledge of the student is what makes the judgment.

Red verdict — what it means

The file was altered after export — accidental edit, tampering, or not a genuine Red Stet recording. The original can be re-exported and re-verified.

Failed — see flagged checks below

2 of 4 checks passed.

Document body hash

Body hash mismatch — recorded a7c2b9..., computed 4f81d3.... The document text was modified after export.

Bundle seal

Bundle seal mismatch. The bundle has been edited after export.

A failed check means "this file was modified," not "the student cheated." Originals re-export cleanly.

The signature chain & tampering signature

The four checks defend against accidental edits. The signature chain defends against deliberate forgery — someone fabricating a bundle from scratch and passing it off as a Red Stet recording.

Every export is signed with Red Stet's ES256 JWT. The signature sits at __signature__, contains a SHA-256 of the canonical manifest payload, and is signed with the project's private key. The public key lives at signing.publicKey for independent verification.

Reverse-engineer the bundle format and you still can't sign it. The private key is ours.

Key rotation

The signing key has a stable key id (kid, e.g. rm-2026-q2) rotated periodically. Older files signed with older kids still verify — prior public keys stay reachable. Rotation only affects new files.

Need third-party signature verification (legal proceedings, journalism)? Email [email protected].

{
  "provenanceBundle": {
    "manifests": [...],
    "bundleSeal": "a7c2b9...",
    "bodyHash": "...",
    "eventCount": 8423
  },
  "author": "Ava Chen",
  "__signature__": {
    "jws":  "eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIs...",
    "kid":  "rm-2026-q2",
    "alg":  "ES256",
    "hash": "sha256:c91fa..."
  }
}

ES256 JWT signed by Red Stet's private key. Public key at signing.publicKey.

For parents — what you're looking at

Your child's teacher sent you a Red Stet .red.md file. Here's what to know.

You don't need an account

Drop the file into red-stet.com/verify. The check runs in your browser. Nothing leaves your computer.

What the page shows

A verdict and a summary of how the essay was written: session count, total time, dates. The "Verified" badge means the file hasn't been edited since the teacher exported it.

What it doesn't show

Anything else about your child. No other essays, no private teacher notes, no school records, no other students. One piece of work and its provenance.

If something looks wrong

If verification fails, or if the recording doesn't match what your child described, talk to the teacher — they shared the file and can re-export. Email us for Red Stet problems.

✓

Verified — file integrity intact

4 of 4 checks passed.

Author: Ava Chen
Sessions: 4 (11h 23m total)
First keystroke: Mar 9, 09:14
Last keystroke: Mar 14, 16:47

Parent's view after dropping the file into /verify — verdict plus how the work was written.

For admins & college reviewers

Same surface a parent sees, different intent — evidence, not celebration. What to look for:

Session boundaries

Real essays accrue across multiple sessions over days. Manifests chain with start and end times. A multi-thousand-word essay produced in one 12-minute session is worth asking about.

The integrity checks

All four should pass. A failure means the file was altered after export — not who or why, just that this isn't the original. Ask the teacher to re-export.

The signature

An authentic recording carries an ES256 JWT signed by Red Stet's private key (see above). For formal proceedings needing cryptographic certainty, cite the signature. We can help beyond what the standalone page shows.

Process evidence, not a verdict. A clean session record isn't proof of authorship; an irregular one isn't proof of fraud. Combined with judgment, it's the most useful artifact in the room.

Look for Multi-session writing

Real essays accrue. Three or four sessions across a week is typical; a single session is rare and worth asking about.

Look for Integrity checks all green

Any failure means the file was altered post-export.

Look for Signed bundle

The __signature__ ES256 JWT is the cryptographic anchor for formal proceedings.

Anonymizing & scrubbing

The verifier shows the student's display name — minimum useful identification by default.

Display name vs. account name

Students can set a public display name distinct from their account — pen name, professional sharing, first-name-last-initial. The verifier shows the display name only; full account name and email never appear.

What you cannot scrub

The document body. If the essay names the student or other students in the prose, the verifier renders it verbatim — no auto-redaction. Editing the body breaks the body-hash check. For anonymous review, share the chart and check results verbally rather than the file.

Anonymized by default

Email address — never shown
Full legal name — never shown
Account internals — never shown
Other classes, other students — never shown

Names in the prose appear verbatim. No auto-redaction.

The .red.md is durable

The file is meant to survive — verifiable offline forever, even if Red Stet shuts down. That same durability means a shared file can't be unshared.

Sent is sent. The verifier doesn't phone home; copies on the recipient's machine keep verifying regardless of anything on our side. Treat sharing as one-way.

Sensitive material leaked via a .red.md? Email [email protected]. We can't claw the file back, but we can rotate signing keys, document the leak, and help with affected-party notifications.