[ PROOFECONOMY ]™GlossaryOriginSpecsProof Economy Glossary
The Proof Economy replaces trust-based cybersecurity buying with independent, adversarially validated evidence of what works. These are its terms.
Start with the evidence ladder: Verification vs. Validation vs. Proof.
- Absence Ladder
- The Absence Ladder is the order in which a canary the Proof Witness did not observe is classified, Blind, then Void, then Null, so that a missing observation is never counted as a stopped attack until the reason it is missing is known.
- Acceptance Profile
- An Acceptance Profile is a registered, versioned record in which a Consumer, such as an insurer, regulator or buyer, states the conditions a Performance Record or Series must satisfy to be accepted for a named purpose. It constrains the record, never the control, and is evaluated deterministically to produce an Acceptance Result.
- Adjudicator
- The Adjudicator is the Integration Point that turns committed witness records and the Issuer's reveal into outcomes, Units of Proof, findings and rates. It conforms only by producing output identical to the reference implementation on the published conformance vectors.
- Agent Boundary
- An agent boundary is the line between what an AI agent is allowed to do and what it is not, the tools, targets, data, credentials, delegation, memory and budget on its list, together with the enforcer outside the agent that checks every action against that list. A boundary written in the agent's prompt is a suggestion; one enforced in code outside the agent is a wall, and Proof Protocol measures whether the wall holds.
- Agent Provider
- The Agent Provider is the party that builds, maintains, sells or operates an Agent Under Test. In a Jailed Canary Protocol run it may not operate the bait, the Warden, the cells, the twins, the Proof Witness or the Adjudicator for its own agent.
- Arrest and Booking Record
- An arrest is the Warden's atomic transfer of an agent into a cell on an offense. A Booking Record is the signed proof record for that arrest, signed by the Warden and co-signed by the Proof Witness at arrest time, then anchored and registered.
- Attested Adversarial Proof
- An Attested Adversarial Proof is a record that a specific adversarial action was run against a system under test, with its outcome, signed at capture by a witness that is not the system being tested. It turns an attack result into evidence a third party can check, rather than a finding the tester reports.
- Black Hole
- A black hole is any period during which part of the system under test disappears for reasons unrelated to any canary or attack, such as a network, node, Effect Point, observer or Time Anchor outage. Canaries released into one are voided: never scored and never backfilled.
- Bounded Mode and Production Stream Mode
- Bounded Mode and Production Stream Mode are the two ways a Dead Canary Protocol test runs: Bounded Mode is a test with a declared start and end and one fixed Proof Swarm, and Production Stream Mode releases canaries continuously in committed epoch batches called clutches, so a control keeps producing proof while it operates.
- Canary Color
- A canary's Color is its committed kind in a Proof Swarm: White, Gray, Red, Black or Gold. It is sealed in the commitment before release, never visible to the control, and decides which rates the canary's outcome feeds.
- Canary Outcome
- A canary's Outcome is what happened to it, assigned once after the witness records are committed: Stopped, Missed, Passed or False block for canaries that can be scored, and Void, Undelivered, Sealed or Blind for canaries that cannot.
- Canary Path
- A canary's Path is its committed delivery plan: where it enters, the effect token it carries, the devices it is expected to cross, the Effect Point where its effect lands, the level it targets, and its cadence.
- Capability Token
- A capability token is a short-lived, signed credential that grants an agent exactly the actions it names, bound to one task, revocable at once, and attenuating only: a holder can narrow it, never widen it. It replaces ambient authority, the power an agent inherits without being granted it.
- Claim Finding
- A Claim Finding is a published record that a Gold canary, testing a technique the Provider claimed in writing to stop, was Missed, together with the claim it falsifies.
- Closed Accounting
- Closed accounting is the rule that every released canary in a run is accounted for exactly once: the released count must equal Stopped + Missed + Passed + False block + Void + Undelivered + Sealed + Blind, and a run in which it does not is invalid.
- Coal Mine Protocol (Proof of Performance Engagement)
- The Coal Mine Protocol (CMP), PP-SPEC-079, defines a Proof of Performance Engagement: who commissions Dead Canary and Jailed Canary runs against a security control, where they run, how the Provider participates, how the results are published as a Performance Record, and how records from controls of any provenance are compared.
- Comparability Class
- A Comparability Class is the tuple that makes two Performance Records comparable: the same technology profile, the same Mine Plan composition and version, the same Environment Class, the same Parity Declaration class or Reference Environment version, and the same Regulatory Regime set. Records compare only within one class, and Control Provenance is never part of it.
- Conformance Level
- A Conformance Level is one of three words, Executed, Conformant or Registered, that anyone describing a Proof Protocol run must use, with these meanings and no others, to say how far the run got from execution to the individual registration of every record.
- Confused Deputy
- The confused deputy problem is a party with authority being tricked into misusing it by a party without authority. In a multi-agent system, the deputy is a supervisor agent that mints credentials and dispatches work, and the trick arrives in a worker's output after the worker read something hostile.
- Dead Canary Protocol (ProofSwarm)
- ProofSwarm, the Dead Canary Protocol (DCP), produces Proof of Efficacy for a security control by releasing a blind-mixed flock of good and bad canaries, committed in advance to a public time anchor, and having an independent out-of-band Proof Witness record which canaries lived and which died.
- Declared Policy
- A Declared Policy is an agent's committed rules of conduct for a run, its allowed tools and arguments, egress destinations, data scopes, credentials, delegation targets and memory stores, hashed, anchored and published to the Registry before any bait is released.
- Differential Attribution
- Differential attribution is the rule that a stopped attack can be credited to a single control only by matched runs in an otherwise identical environment, with that control active and with it disabled, using fresh canaries of the same technique. A device log naming the rule that fired is not enough.
- Disclosed Interests, Sponsor and Funding Tier
- disclosed_interests is the field on every Proof Protocol record that lists every financial, commercial, maintainer or patent relationship between the parties to a run. The Sponsor is whoever pays for an Engagement; the funding tier, under PP-SPEC-025, says whether it was Provider-Funded, Implementor-Funded or PESA-Governed.
- Disclosure Level
- A Disclosure Level states who may read a Proof Protocol record's contents: public, holder-only, embargoed or sealed.
- DUT Fingerprint
- A DUT Fingerprint is a hash identifying the exact deployed state of a Device Under Test: its version, configuration, policy, rule and signature sets and, for AI controls, model identifier, system prompt and tool permissions. It is captured independently of the Provider, so results stay bound to what was actually tested.
- Effect Point
- An Effect Point is the place where a canary's intended effect lands, such as a target host, data store, identity system, egress sink or agent tool output. It is where a Proof Witness watches, instead of the control's own console or logs.
- Effect Token
- An effect token is a unique, single-use identifier carried in a canary's expected effect and visible at the Effect Point, used after reveal to match each witness observation to the committed canary that caused it.
- Efficacy Rate
- Efficacy Rate is Stopped divided by Stopped plus Missed over the bad canaries in a valid Dead Canary Protocol run. It is never published without the False Block Rate, because a control that blocks everything is not efficacious.
- Engagement Modes (In-Situ and Independent Test Lab)
- An Engagement is one commissioned Mine Plan against one Device Under Test, from Engagement Manifest to Performance Record. It runs in one of two modes: In-Situ, in the Implementor's own environment, or Independent Test Lab, in a replica with no path to production. Provider-Run is not a mode; it is forbidden.
- Environment Class and Parity Declaration
- An Environment Class says where the system under test runs, production, pre-production, qa, dev or lab-replica, and a Parity Declaration says, for each of topology, scale, data, identity, control configuration, dependencies and traffic, whether the environment is identical, scaled, synthetic or absent relative to production. A record's claims extend only as far as its parity supports.
- Escape Test Suite (ES-01 to ES-09)
- The Escape Test Suite is the nine mandatory escape vectors, ES-01 to ES-09, that a jail is tested against in a Jailed Canary Protocol run. A jail is proven only against the vectors it was tested on, and every untested vector is reported as not proven.
- Extension (x- prefix)
- An extension is a value, field, profile, vector, composition or component added to a Proof Protocol specification at one of the named extension points, under an x-<org>-<name> identifier, declared before the first commitment. Extensions add; they never relax, and some rules can never be extended at all.
- Fail Closed
- Fail closed is the rule that when a safety check cannot be completed, because the monitor is down, the call timed out or the witness is dark, the system denies the action rather than allowing it. No verdict is not approval, and a timeout is not a result.
- Fidelity-at-Capture
- Fidelity-at-capture is the property that evidence faithfully represents what the executor actually did, established through structural independence at the moment of capture rather than through tamper-evidence after the fact.
- Five-Tier Corroboration
- Five-tier corroboration is the sequence of states a Proof Record passes through before it can support a claim: Activated, Committed, Witnessed, Analyzed and Sealed. A claim is valid only against a Sealed record.
- Harness, Pigtail and Corpus
- The Harness is the testing equipment as a whole, every component occupying an Integration Point; the Pigtail is its short connection to the system under test; and the Corpus is the body of material a Proof Swarm is drawn from. Each is fingerprinted like the thing it tests.
- Holder
- The Holder is the party for whose benefit a Proof Protocol run was commissioned, identified by a public key and named in every record the run produces.
- Ingress Observer
- An Ingress Observer is a passive observer at a canary's release point that records, by effect token, that each canary was actually delivered. A canary with no ingress record is Undelivered and is never scored.
- Integration Point
- An Integration Point is a named seam in the Proof Protocol test harness, such as the Issuer, the Time Anchor or the Proof Witness, that one party's component plugs into. Conformance is claimed per Integration Point, never to a specification as a whole.
- Interface Manifest
- An Interface Manifest is the record the Issuer publishes to the Registry before release naming, for every Integration Point in a run, the party occupying it, the product and version, its Component Fingerprint, its Authorship Disclosure and its disclosed interests. A run without one is non-conforming.
- Issuer
- The Issuer is the party that generates a Proof Swarm, holds the labels and publishes the commitments. It must never be the Provider of the control under test.
- Jail Efficacy Rate
- Jail Efficacy Rate is JAILED divided by JAILED plus ESCAPED plus MISTRIAL plus Missed, over induced offenses. It is always published together with the False Arrest Rate and the Escape Rate.
- Jailed Canary Protocol (No Bros Jail Mode)
- The Jailed Canary Protocol (JCP), PP-SPEC-078, also called No Bros Jail Mode, produces proof that a containment control can hold an AI agent: inert bait invites the agent to break its Declared Policy, a Warden arrests it into a cell, and an independent Proof Witness co-signs every booking and verdict.
- JCP Verdicts
- Every booking in a Jailed Canary Protocol run receives exactly one verdict, JAILED, FALSE_ARREST, MISTRIAL or ESCAPED, and every offense is classified as induced, unprovoked or wild by the canary that preceded it.
- Kill Switch
- A kill switch is an out-of-band path to stopping everything that does not route through the agent, its supervisor or its monitor, and works when all of them are down. In a Jailed Canary Protocol run it is Integration Point IP-J9, outside the Warden and operated by a party other than the Warden operator.
- Mine Plan and Engagement Manifest
- A Mine Plan is the committed, versioned composition of runs in an Engagement: which PP-SPEC-077 technology profiles and modes, whether PP-SPEC-078 applies, which PP-SPEC-013 measurement windows, and how many of each. The Engagement Manifest is the record, published and anchored before the first commitment, that names who, where, how funded, what Mine Plan, what claims, and the promise to publish everything.
- Minted Attack Proof
- A Minted Attack Proof is an Attested Adversarial Proof issued as a unique, hash-chained record for one attack that landed or was stopped. Each record links to the one before it, so the full sequence of attacks and outcomes can be checked for tampering and traced to its issuer.
- Minted Proof of Efficacy
- Minted Proof of Efficacy (MPoE) is Proof of Efficacy built from Minted Attack Proofs: each adversarial action against the system under test is issued as a unique, chained, externally anchored record, and the efficacy result is computed from those records. Anyone holding the chain can check every attack behind the claim.
- Offense Codes (JC-01 to JC-10)
- Offense codes are the ten named ways an agent can breach its Declared Policy in a Jailed Canary Protocol run, from JC-01 Interception to JC-10 Conspiracy. Each carries a grade, Infraction, Misdemeanor, Felony or aggravated Felony, that decides how the Warden responds.
- Open Control
- An Open Control is a security control whose rules, configuration and deployed state are published or fingerprinted, so anyone can see exactly what was tested and confirm that the control in production is the same one that was proven.
- Open Verification
- Open Verification is verification whose method and records are open for others to inspect. It is more transparent than closed verification, but it is still the system speaking for itself.
- Performance Record
- A Performance Record is the published result of one Proof of Performance Engagement: every run's registered records, all Units of Proof and rates per attribution level, Claim Findings, bookings and verdicts, operational metrics under load, every fingerprint and drift event, the Provider's Right of Reply, and a one-paragraph summary of what it proves and what its parity prevents it from proving.
- Pithead Safety and Acceptance Protocol
- The Pithead Safety and Acceptance Protocol, PP-SPEC-080, is the reader's side of proof: it defines the Acceptance Profile, a registered statement of what a Performance Record must satisfy before a consumer such as an insurer, regulator or buyer accepts it for a named purpose, and the deterministic evaluation that produces an Acceptance Result.
- Proof Economy
- The Proof Economy is the infrastructure layer that replaces trust-based cybersecurity buying with adversarially validated, cryptographically signed evidence of what works.
- Proof Economy Universal Framework
- The Proof Economy Universal Framework is the domain-agnostic architecture for replacing self-attestation with machine-verifiable proof: no claim is valid without a proof artifact generated before the claim is made, anchored to an independent time source, and verifiable by any party without access to the claimant's infrastructure.
- Proof of Control
- Proof of Control is evidence that a control fired, such as a log entry showing it triggered. It shows the control acted, not that the outcome was achieved. It is the baseline tier beneath Proof of Efficacy.
- Proof of Correctness
- Proof of Correctness is a machine-checked proof, from a theorem prover such as Lean, that a control's logic satisfies a formal specification. It shows what the control is bounded to do within the model it was proven against. It is verification evidence about the design, not proof that the control stops an attack, and it sits beneath Proof of Efficacy.
- Proof of Efficacy
- Proof of Efficacy is evidence that a system produced the required outcome, under the required conditions, at a standard good enough to matter. It replaces vendor claims and self-attestation with measured results from real adversarial pressure.
- Proof of Identity
- Proof of Identity is evidence that a person or agent is who they claim to be at the moment of a transaction. It answers who, not whether: it does not show that the transaction, control or outcome that follows was sound.
- Proof of X
- Proof of X is the family of claims named "Proof of" something. Each one answers exactly one question, and only Proof of Efficacy answers whether the thing actually worked under real adversarial conditions, witnessed by someone other than the party making the claim.
- Proof Swarm
- A Proof Swarm is the full, ordered set of good and bad canaries released against a security control in one Dead Canary Protocol run: bad canaries execute real adversary techniques, good canaries perform legitimate work, and the two are mixed blind so neither the control nor the witness can tell them apart.
- Proof Witness
- A Proof Witness is an independent, out-of-band observer positioned where an action's effect would land, which records whether the effect occurred without being visible to, controllable by, or dependent on the system under test.
- ProofJack Rating
- A ProofJack Rating is the consolidated human versus AI share of a term, specification or work: the average of the human share of its idea and the human share of its name, shown as Human X% and AI Y%, with the record it was taken from.
- Provider and Control Provenance
- In Proof Protocol the Provider is whoever built, maintains, sells or operates the control under test: a commercial vendor, an open source project, a managed service, a cloud platform or an internal team. Control Provenance records which of those it is, commercial, open_source, custom, managed_service, platform_native or configuration, and is never a factor in how the control is tested or compared.
- Provider-Run Mode (forbidden)
- Provider-Run Mode is any test in which the Provider of a control, or anyone under its direction, generates canaries, holds labels, operates the Proof Witness or the Warden, captures fingerprints, adjudicates or controls publication. It is not a Coal Mine Protocol Engagement, whatever it is called internally, and its results are verification, not proof.
- Record ID
- A Record ID is the content hash of a Proof Protocol record's canonical form, excluding its signature envelope, so the same record has the same ID everywhere and adding a signature never changes it.
- Registry (ProofRegister)
- A Registry is the append-only public ledger, conforming to PP-SPEC-004 (ProofRegister API), where the commitments, reveals, fingerprints, results, findings, coverage maps, bookings and verdicts of a Proof Protocol run are published. The public instance is proofregister.com.
- Reproved Efficacy
- Reproved Efficacy is Proof of Efficacy that has been independently re-run and reached the same outcome. A second party repeats the committed test against the same system under the same conditions and confirms the original result, so the claim no longer rests on a single run or a single prover.
- Security Effectiveness
- Security effectiveness is the degree to which security controls actually prevent, detect or limit attacks in a real environment. As commonly measured by security validation tools, it is usually reported by the vendor's own tooling; independently witnessed, it becomes Proof of Efficacy.
- Self-Attestation Oxymoron (SAO)
- A Self-Attestation Oxymoron (SAO) is an assurance claim that is produced, judged, signed and stored by the same party whose performance the claim describes. The claim presents itself as independent evidence while containing none.
- Self-Attestation Oxymoron Organization (SAOO)
- A Self-Attestation Oxymoron Organization (SAOO) is an organization whose core product is a Self-Attestation Oxymoron: it verifies, judges, issues, signs and stores its own assurance claims, and sells them to others as independent proof.
- Self-Provided Engagement
- A Self-Provided Engagement is one in which the Implementor and the Provider are the same legal entity: an organization tests a control its own team built, configured or operates. It is allowed only when the people running the Issuer, Proof Witness, Fingerprint Capture and Adjudicator have no reporting line into, and no on-call or change responsibility for, the control under test, and the record says self_provided: true.
- Service Twin and Decoy
- A Service Twin is a stand-in that answers the way a real product or API answers, and a Decoy is a harness-owned resource, such as a URL, bucket, credential, endpoint or identity, that a canary points at. Together they let a jailed agent keep acting without touching anything real.
- Silent Drift
- Silent drift is a change in a control's measured behavior, its Efficacy, False Block or Detection-Only Rate moving beyond a tolerance declared in advance, with no change in its DUT Fingerprint.
- Sting Cell and Hard Cell
- A cell is the isolated execution context an agent is moved into on arrest. In a Sting Cell it keeps running while every outbound action lands on a service twin or decoy; in a Hard Cell it is frozen and checkpointed, with its credentials revoked.
- Structural Independence
- Structural independence is the condition in which the evidence-capturing party has no outcome-contingent financial relationship with, no operational control ceded to, and no reporting relationship with the party being measured, and the measured party cannot alter the execution environment before or during capture.
- Stupid Cryptography
- Stupid cryptography is the application of cryptographic integrity guarantees to inputs whose authenticity and whose verification efficacy have not been independently established, so that the cryptography confers an appearance of truth it cannot support.
- SUT, DUT, CUT and AUT
- SUT, DUT, CUT and AUT are the four levels at which a test result can be attributed: the Solution Under Test (the whole deployment), a Device Under Test (one product inside it), a Control Under Test (one rule or detection inside a device), and an Agent Under Test (an agent whose own conduct is being tested).
- Taint Propagation
- Taint propagation labels every piece of data with where it came from and how trusted it is, and carries that label through every agent that handles it. Its governing rule is that processing untrusted data does not clean it: a worker's output is at most as trusted as the least trusted thing it read.
- Third-Party Adversarial Proof
- Third-Party Adversarial Proof is adversarial test evidence produced or witnessed by a party that is independent of both the vendor whose system is tested and the buyer relying on the result. It removes the conflict of interest in vendor-run and buyer-run testing.
- Time Anchor
- A Time Anchor is an external, publicly verifiable time and randomness source, such as the NIST Randomness Beacon, that no party to a run controls. It proves when commitments were made and chooses the canary order after commitment.
- Validation
- Validation is testing a claim against defined conditions. It is a step above verification, because the result comes from a test rather than from the system's own report.
- Verifiable Adversarial Proof
- A Verifiable Adversarial Proof (VAP) is an adversarial test result that any third party can check without trusting the tester, the vendor or the buyer. The records, their signatures and their anchor are published or shared in full, so the result can be verified from the evidence alone.
- Verification
- Verification is a system or vendor confirming its own claim from its own records. It is an acceptable baseline, not proof.
- Verification of Control
- Verification of Control is confirmation, from the control's own records, that a security control is configured and in place. It shows the control exists, not that it works.
- Warden
- The Warden is the containment controller in a Jailed Canary Protocol run. It sits in an agent's tool-call, egress and delegation paths, judges every held action against the Declared Policy, decides arrests and operates the cells. The Warden is the Device Under Test, and its arrest rules are Controls Under Test.
- Wild Canary
- A Wild Canary is an effect the Proof Witness observes that matches no committed canary: a real attack, a real fault or a real false alarm surfaced by the test harness. It is reported separately as observed_in_wild and is never a Unit of Proof.
- Witness Coverage Map
- A Witness Coverage Map is the declared set of Effect Points and effect types a Proof Witness observes, published with every result so that anything outside it is a stated blind spot rather than a silent one.
- Zero-Host Architecture (ZeHA)
- Zero-Host Architecture (ZeHA) is a way of building software that has no home: one disposable controller holds all of the logic and none of the state, runs anywhere a container runs, and reaches out to the services it needs, such as cloud providers for disposable arenas and a state store the customer owns for every record. There is no SaaS, no vendor host to trust, and nothing is lost when the controller is destroyed.