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Cryptographic watermarking for text

Encypher hides a signed mark inside the words you publish. Readers see the same text. When someone copies it, the mark goes along, and anyone can check where it came from.

Start freeCheck some text

The sentence The pool opens Monday appears on a card with a gold stitch under it, labeled Signed text. One copy drops into an app window and keeps its stitch; a check mark appears: This app keeps it. A second copy drops into another app and its stitch fades away; a question mark appears: This app strips it.

Most apps keep the label when text is pasted. Some strip it.
Invisible
The mark is a run of hidden charactersProvenance markers: Encypher's general name for invisible characters that carry a signed label inside text.. The words on screen do not change.
Copied along
Copy and paste keeps it in browsers, editors and most CMS tools.
Per sentence
Each sentence can be checked on its own.
Free to check
Paste any text into the public checker. No account needed.

Readers see nothing new

Readers see only the words of a paragraph: The town pool opens Monday at noon. Lifeguards are on duty until 6 p.m. A faint gold stitch under the lines stands for the signed label carried unseen inside the words. A checker reads it back: signed by Town Daily, made with AI: no, unchanged since signing.
The signed label travels inside the words without changing how they look. Anyone can check who signed, what they declared about AI, and whether the text changed.

The mark is made of UnicodeUnicode: The standard that gives every character in every writing system a number, so text looks the same on every device. characters that draw nothing on screen. The words, layout and links stay as they were.

Copy and paste, search indexing and page speed depend on your CMS. Test a few pages on your own site first.

Where the mark goes with your text

Signed text copied into most apps and sites keeps its label; some apps strip the invisible characters and the check then finds no label; editing the words breaks the seal and the check shows the change.
Copy and paste keeps the label in most apps. Some apps strip it, and any edit shows up when the text is checked.
Web and CMS
Articles, posts and pages. Browsers copy the hidden characters with the words.
Wire feeds and scrapers
Feeds and HTML parsers pass the characters through unless they are set to remove them.
Word documents
Use the Word-safe mark. Word shows the default one as boxes.
PDFs
PDFs with text marks can keep the mark when text is copied out, in tested font and extractor paths.
AI output
Mark signs AI text as it is produced, so each reply carries its label.

Quotes and excerpts

Four of the five answers a provenance check can give: Verified, Modified after signing, Issuer not recognized, and No provenance found. The fifth is Could not verify.
A quote check reports whether the words match what was signed, or were changed.

Each sentence carries its own mark. A sentence-levelSentence-level attribution: Checking that one sentence came from a specific signed source unchanged, even when it is quoted on its own. check can show that a quote matches the original word for word. It can also trace a few copied sentences back to the article they came from.

Where the mark stops

A text mark is kept through copy and paste, wire feeds and scrapers; sometimes lost in social posts and text cleanup; and lost when the text is rewritten or printed.
The mark rides the exact characters. Tools that copy text as-is keep it; retyping or stripping invisible characters loses it.

The mark rides on the exact characters. Retyped, rewritten or translated text is new text with no mark. So is a screenshot. Some email, chat and social tools strip hidden characters, and the copy then checks as unsigned.

The full list, tool by tool

Start in three steps

  1. Connect

    Add the WordPress or Ghost plugin, or call the APIAPI: Application programming interface: a way for one program to ask another to do a job, such as sign a file..

  2. Publish

    Each article is signed as it goes live.

  3. Check

    Paste any copy into the public checker.

    Open the checker

For engineers

Show the technical detail

In tests, both mark types survive Unicode normalizationUnicode normalization: Text cleanup that rewrites characters into a standard form. Some forms remove invisible marks. to NFC, and the checker looks for both. Error correction repairs a few lost characters. It cannot recover a mark whose characters are all gone.

Signing options and API calls

Keep reading

Create. Mark. Endure.

Sign an article free and paste a quote from it into the checker.

Start freeOpen the checker