A handshake runs before any real message: two parties with no reason to trust each other settle terms each can check for itself. These notes do the same with records, for a reader deciding whether a construction is sound rather than whether to buy something. The primitives, byte layouts and failure modes are here in full, because a construction you cannot re-implement is a construction you cannot check.
Prevention and detection are different properties: what a record proves once its operator is inside the adversary.
Paper 002A salted-leaf Merkle construction that survives redaction, and the defect that let a value be shortened by lengthening its salt.
Paper 003Deriving the signed bytes from the replay attacks they must survive, one field at a time.
Paper 004A truncated chain is a valid chain: the limits of self-checking evidence, and the role of a witness.
Paper 005Governance, liability evidence and agent authority look like one problem and are three, with a custody seam open.
Paper 006Revocation is a claim about which actions can still commit rather than a state change, decided by the enforcement topology.
Software cannot make a record unwritable by whoever holds its credentials; it can make alteration impossible to hide from a holder of an earlier commitment. Paper 002 makes each top-level field a salted Merkle leaf, so a withheld field is visible as a withholding, not an absence. It publishes its own defect with the failing input: a value can be shortened by lengthening its salt. A truncated chain still verifies: omission is invisible without an earlier commitment held elsewhere, worth only its holder's independence.
Every byte-level claim is reproducible from the construction as described, and each defect was found in working code with its failing input stated; a hypothesis is called one. The constructions came from a commercial evidence system, as paper 002 records; its internals are not published, so a reader checks the construction, not its implementation. Deliberately absent: prices, plans and tiers, deployment internals, and product semantics — what a record should contain is a design decision, not a property of the construction. European instruments are cited where they explain why a technical property matters. They are not legal analysis, they are not advice, and where a legal question is genuinely unsettled the papers say so rather than resolving it in passing.
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