[ PROOFECONOMY ]™GlossaryOriginSpecsPithead 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.
What it means
PP-SPEC-077, 078 and 079 produce records of what a security control did. They never say whether a reader should accept one. That is the consumer’s decision, and the Pithead Protocol makes the consumer write that decision down, in public, in advance, in a form a machine and a human evaluate the same way.
The principles
- A profile constrains the record, never the control. No profile may require a particular Provider, provenance or product.
- A profile adds, never relaxes. It may require more than 079 requires. It may not accept an Executed run, an unregistered record, a Provider-Run Engagement, a record outside its Comparability Class, or one whose Registry Receipt does not verify.
- A profile is published before it is applied. A record is never judged against a profile version registered after its Engagement Manifest was anchored, unless the profile says it applies retroactively and the Holder consents.
- A profile is a record, hashed, signed, registered and versioned, so a Holder can prove which version they were measured against.
- Evaluation is deterministic, by machine or human, with the same result. A requirement that needs judgment belongs in the consumer’s own process after acceptance.
- Profiles disclose their own authorship.
The parts
- Acceptance Profile: the consumer’s conditions.
- Acceptance Evaluation and Acceptance Result: the check and its registered outcome.
- Profile Registry: the maintainer’s list of recognized profiles, cited by name such as
ap:insurance-cyber-underwriting:1.0.
The worked example in the specification is a cyber insurance underwriting profile.
Related terms
- Acceptance Profile
- Coal Mine Protocol (Proof of Performance Engagement)
- Conformance Level
- Performance Record