diff --git a/verifier/store.go b/verifier/store.go
index 7cb5d3a..07427dc 100644
--- a/verifier/store.go
+++ b/verifier/store.go
@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ package verifier
 
 import (
 	"encoding/binary"
+	"errors"
 	"fmt"
 	"io"
 	"sync/atomic"
@@ -90,18 +91,23 @@ func (s *LogStore) StoreLog(log *raft.Log) error {
 }
 
 func encodeCheckpointMeta(startIdx, sum uint64) []byte {
-	var buf [16]byte
-	binary.LittleEndian.PutUint64(buf[0:8], startIdx)
-	binary.LittleEndian.PutUint64(buf[8:16], sum)
+	var buf [24]byte
+	binary.LittleEndian.PutUint64(buf[0:8], ExtensionMagicPrefix)
+	binary.LittleEndian.PutUint64(buf[8:16], startIdx)
+	binary.LittleEndian.PutUint64(buf[16:24], sum)
 	return buf[:]
 }
 
 func decodeCheckpointMeta(bs []byte) (startIdx, sum uint64, err error) {
-	if len(bs) < 16 {
+	if len(bs) < 24 {
 		return 0, 0, io.ErrShortBuffer
 	}
-	startIdx = binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(bs[0:8])
-	sum = binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(bs[8:16])
+	magic := binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(bs[0:8])
+	if magic != ExtensionMagicPrefix {
+		return 0, 0, errors.New("invalid extension data")
+	}
+	startIdx = binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(bs[8:16])
+	sum = binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(bs[16:24])
 	return startIdx, sum, nil
 }
 
diff --git a/verifier/verifier.go b/verifier/verifier.go
index 181231a..b955bad 100644
--- a/verifier/verifier.go
+++ b/verifier/verifier.go
@@ -13,6 +13,25 @@ import (
 	"github.com/segmentio/fasthash/fnv1a"
 )
 
+const (
+	// ExtensionMagicPrefix is the prefix we append to log Extensions fields to
+	// disambiguate from other middleware that may use extensions. This value is
+	// carefully constructed to be completely invalid as the beginning of a
+	// protobuf (3) wire protocol message since the other known user of this field
+	// encodes its data that way. If the first byte were 0xa8 this would be a
+	// valid protobuf field encoding for an int field, however currently the 3
+	// least significant bits encode the field type as 7, which is not a valid
+	// type in the current spec. Even if this does change in the future, the
+	// field's tag number encoded here is 123456789 so it's extremely unlikely
+	// that any valid protobuf schema will ever have enough fields or arbitrarily
+	// decide to assign field tags that large (though unrecognized tags would be
+	// ignored on decode). Finally, the value of the field is the varint encoding
+	// of the randomly chosen value 53906 so if type 7 is ever valid in the future
+	// and used as a length-prefixed type, the length decoded would be way longer
+	// than the buffer making it invalid.
+	ExtensionMagicPrefix uint64 = 0xafd1f9d60392a503
+)
+
 // IsCheckpointFn is a function that can decide whether the contents of a raft
 // log's Data represents a checkpoint message. It is called on every append so
 // it must be relatively fast in the common case. If it returns true for a log,