[ PROOFECONOMY ]™GlossaryOriginSpecsProvider 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.
The Provider
The term is deliberately wide. Every rule that constrains the Provider applies to all of them equally: a vendor’s field team and the customer’s own engineers who built a control are both the Provider of that control.
The Provider:
- never generates canaries, holds labels, operates the Proof Witness or Time Anchor, captures fingerprints or adjudicates (see Integration Point);
- never receives labels, colors, the Proof Swarm or the release schedule before reveal, or feeds from the Witness, Ingress Observer or liveness probes;
- never conditions an Engagement on a right to review, delay or veto publication, and never presents any part of its output as its own test result;
- receives every published record at the same time as the Implementor;
- may exercise the Right of Reply, request a new Engagement against a new fingerprint, and cite its Performance Record in full with its Registry URI;
- may attach its own telemetry as an annotation, never as an outcome.
In jail mode the same role is the Agent Provider.
Control Provenance
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
commercial |
A vendor’s product |
open_source |
An open source project |
custom |
Built in house |
managed_service |
Operated by a service provider |
platform_native |
A cloud or platform feature |
configuration |
A configuration of something else |
Recorded in every Engagement. Never part of the Comparability Class. A commercial, an open source and a custom control under the same Mine Plan are placed side by side; the provenance is shown so a reader can weight it, and the record does not.
Related terms
- Agent Provider
- Comparability Class
- Integration Point
- Provider-Run Mode (forbidden)
- Self-Provided Engagement