Questions, answered straight.

Provena is digital evidence infrastructure: a controlled environment that captures online content, preserves it with an auditable chain of custody, and produces reports that can be verified independently. Screenshots ask for trust — Provena's records can be checked.

You navigate in a dedicated remote browser operated by the platform — nothing depends on your machine. While you work, everything is preserved: screenshots, video, files, page snapshots, logs. Every step is recorded live in a hash-linked custody chain, and at the end the material is sealed into a single package.

Three things. A report that explains the record to any reader, from executive summary to full technical trail. The evidence package — a plain ZIP with every file and its inventory. And external proofs registered with independent providers, so the record's existence can be confirmed without relying on Provena.

No. Capturing is just navigating in a browser, and the report's Essential mode reads without technical vocabulary. The depth is there for whoever needs it: a Legal mode for counsel, and audit guides with ready-made scripts for technical experts.

Yes. Watch mode lets invited witnesses observe the session in real time, read-only — and later review the report if access is granted.

Anyone who may need to show, later, what was online: law firms and experts building defensible evidence, institutions that need custody at scale, and individuals or small businesses preserving content before it disappears.

Yes. A reviewer can compute the file's SHA-512 locally through the public check workflow. The browser sends only the hash and the local filename to Provena — never the file content.

Yes. The report can verify the custody chain in the browser, and the canonical custody data can be exported for offline verification with standard hashing tools or the ready-made scripts shipped in the report.

The package — a plain ZIP file — may contain videos, video analysis files, screenshots, external files, page snapshots, logs, domain information, and the manifest listing every file with its hash. The final package is the consolidated evidence set.

No. It is a browser-based way to inspect and extract package contents after local hash validation. The package can always be downloaded.

No. Crops are review helpers generated by the reviewer. They are not Provena-preserved evidence and are not expected to pass the public check — the original screenshots remain the evidence.

Yes. Provena supports controlled deletion workflows. Deletion removes stored files while preserving custody records of what occurred — including the deletion events themselves.

The same record may need to be read by non-technical stakeholders, lawyers, and technical experts. Essential, Legal, and Technical modes adjust depth without changing the underlying evidence.

The report is anchored to the language selected for the captured session, so the evidentiary narrative stays stable and does not silently change with each reader's personal preference.

It depends on the reading mode. Essential emphasizes the session's local time; Legal keeps the local time and adds the UTC offset; Technical emphasizes UTC so reviewers can compare events across systems without timezone ambiguity. The underlying recorded timestamps never change.

An international PDF preservation profile (ISO 19005-2). Provena emits report PDFs in this format so they stay readable the same way decades from now, and fit institutional archiving requirements.

SHA-512 is the cryptographic fingerprint used for the final package and for custody event hashing. If any byte of a file — or the content of any custody event — changes, the resulting hash changes.

Yes. Provena also computes SHA-256 and SHA3-512 for files as supplementary technical references. SHA-512 remains the canonical package hash and custody-event hash.

OpenTimestamps uses a protocol-level SHA-256 commitment. When Provena anchors a SHA-512 target through OpenTimestamps, the Provena target remains the SHA-512 package hash or custody seal; the SHA-256 value is OpenTimestamps' technical reference derived from it.

Provena hashes files at origin, transfers the bytes, hashes them again at destination, compares the values, and writes the file to storage only when the values match.

If the retry has the same logical identity — same session, file type, and filename — Provena treats it as a duplicate and does not create another file record. Byte-level mismatches are caught by transfer integrity, which compares the received bytes with the committed origin hash.

Yes. Each capture session runs in an isolated remote environment, allocated for that session and destroyed afterwards. Nothing depends on the operator's local browser state.

No. Provena registers hashes — the SHA-512 of the final evidence package and of the custody-chain seal — not the evidence files. The evidence itself is never stored on-chain.

No. Provena preserves what was observed during a controlled capture session and provides technical evidence about that observation. It does not prove that the third-party content was true, lawful, or authoritative.

No. Provena provides technical capture, preservation, verification, and reporting capabilities. Admissibility depends on jurisdiction, procedure, context, legal strategy, and the decision-maker's assessment.