Day two of our how-to week is about confidential agreements: salary letters, term sheets, board consents and anything else whose terms should stay between the people who sign it.
Where the terms can travel
Most e-signature services can open the documents they store. A signing request also has parts that travel outside the document: its title, its file name, the note to signers and the certificate. These five settings keep the terms between the parties.
1. Use a service that encrypts in your browser
On Attest, every document is encrypted in the sender's browser before upload and locked to each signer's own key. Attest stores it only as ciphertext.
2. Give the document and the file a neutral name
The title appears in the subject of every signing email and on the certificate. "Employment terms" says less than "Salary offer". Rename the PDF before you upload it, for the same reason.
3. Keep the terms out of your message
Signing emails pass through ordinary email providers. Keep the note to signers free of terms, or leave it empty. The document itself never travels in the email: it opens only in the signer's browser.
4. Choose how private, for each new signer
When a signer is new to Attest, the sender chooses how they get the document. With Ready now, they open and sign as soon as they set up, and the document is end-to-end encrypted from the moment they open it. With Private from the start, only you and your signers can ever open it.
5. Make the certificate private
Choose Private under Verification. Only the parties see the certificate, with who signed and when. Anyone else who looks it up is told the agreement exists and is private.
Proof without the terms
Each signer can still prove they signed, without showing the agreement, with a zero-knowledge proof. That is Friday's guide. Until then, the full guide to confidential agreements covers each setting in detail.
Attest is part of the Horizen ecosystem on Base, and its zero-knowledge proofs are verified on zkVerify.
