Erasure (GDPR Article 17)

The hard part of an audit log is that it must be permanent, and personal data must be erasable. The Black Box keeps the proof and drops the data.

After an erasure	Status
The payload and its salt	deleted
The step's commitment, hash, chain, Merkle root and seal	unchanged; the recording still verifies
Guessing the text back from the hash	not possible without the deleted 16-byte salt
Bytes on disk	since 2026-11-02: SQLite `secure_delete` overwrites them and the write-ahead log is checkpointed and truncated; the response says `erased_from_disk` true or false

What we found on 2026-11-02

Before today, an erased payload stayed readable in the database's write-ahead log file (-wal) until SQLite happened to checkpoint it. We confirmed this on the 1.0.0 engine with a unique marker, fixed it, and added a test that greps the database files for the marker after an erasure.

Not covered

Attributes (step metadata) are not erasable: keep personal data in payloads, not attributes.
Backups and copies you exported earlier are yours to erase.
This is engineering support for erasure requests, not legal advice.

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