Guide
Secure Seals: how they work and how to use one
A certificate can be photocopied. A signature can be imitated. A Secure Seal is the part that is hard to fake, because it is not a document at all: it is a small tamper evident NFC chip fixed to the work and paired with that work’s living record.
What happens when somebody taps it
They hold a phone flat against the front of the piece, over the marked spot, and the Veriroo app checks the work against its live record in seconds. Who made it, its trust status, any verification reports, and who owns it now.
Two details make that more than a link. Every tap is a one-time cryptographic proof, so a photograph of a seal proves nothing and a cloned sticker does not read as the original. And the seal points at the live record rather than carrying a copy of it, which is why it keeps telling the truth as ownership changes. A printed certificate says what was true the day it was printed.
Checking happens in the Veriroo app. That is deliberate: the app can do the cryptographic check, a generic NFC reader cannot.
What peeling it does
The chip carries a physical tamper flag. Removing the seal trips it, permanently, and the next person to tap sees that it was opened and when.
That is what tamper evident actually means, and it is worth being precise about because the phrase gets used loosely. It does not mean the seal cannot be removed. It means a removed seal cannot pretend it was not.
Where it goes
On the canvas itself. Not the frame, and not the stretcher bars.
Two reasons, and the second is the one that decided it. NFC reads through a couple of centimetres, measured through whatever sits between the phone and the chip, so a seal on the raw canvas reads easily from the front while one on a wooden bar is often out of range. And a stretcher can be replaced: canvases get re-stretched after damage, or when a work travels, or because the original bars warped. A proof attached to the furniture can be separated from the thing it was proving without anybody acting dishonestly.
The artist marks where the seal sits, so a buyer knows where to hold the phone rather than hunting for a sticker. We changed this guidance in September and published why.
Getting one onto a piece
Order in the Veriroo app, from a single seal to a pack of fifty, starting at ten pounds. Artists bind a seal to a work from the app too, and binding needs the piece to carry a certificate already, because the seal points at the certificate.
So the order is: build the record, get the certificate, then seal it. A seal on a piece with no record would point at nothing.
If a seal is damaged
It can be replaced without losing history. The new seal links to the same record, the old one is retired and marked as replaced, and the provenance chain stays intact.
That matters more than it sounds. A system where a damaged seal meant a dead record would quietly punish people for ordinary accidents, and the record is supposed to outlive the sticker.
What a seal does not do
It does not authenticate the work. It proves that the object in your hands is the one this record describes, which is a different and narrower claim. Whether the record is telling the truth about who painted it is what expert verification is for.
Those two questions get conflated constantly, and keeping them apart is most of what makes either answer worth having.
Seal packs are available now
Order in the Veriroo app, from a single seal to a pack of fifty, from ten pounds.