Reference
Glossary
The core vocabulary of the Agent Action Capsule and the transparency layer it builds on.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| SCITT | Supply Chain Integrity, Transparency, and Trust — the IETF working group and architecture for registering signed statements in transparency services. Its Architecture is published as RFC 9943 and COSE Receipts as RFC 9942; some related specifications, such as the CCF receipt profile, are still Internet-Drafts. |
| SCITT profile | A specialization of the general SCITT signed-statement format for a domain. The Agent Action Capsule is the profile for agent actions — it builds on SCITT/COSE and interoperates with any SCITT transparency service, rather than being a separate standard. |
| COSE | CBOR Object Signing and Encryption — the signature format used for statements and receipts. |
| COSE_Sign1 | A single-signer COSE structure: one signature over a protected header and payload. The envelope an Agent Action Capsule uses. |
| Signed Statement | A COSE_Sign1 claim about something — here, an agent action. The capsule is a profiled Signed Statement. |
| Agent Action Capsule | The profile in this project: a Signed Statement over application/agent-action-capsule+json committing to an action and its input/output digests. |
| Transparency Service | A service that registers Signed Statements into an append-only log, issues receipts, and publishes tree heads and proofs. |
| Transparency log | The public, append-only log a Transparency Service maintains. It is publicly readable — anyone can fetch its entries and verify any one of them; nothing is taken on trust. |
| Ledger | Your local append-only trail of capsules (e.g. ledger.jsonl) — distinct from the public transparency log. The ledger is yours; the transparency log is the shared, witnessed record. |
| Receipt | A signed proof, returned by a transparency service, that a statement was included in its log. Verifiable offline against the log key. |
| VDS | Verifiable Data Structure — how a log proves inclusion and consistency. vds=1 is RFC9162_SHA256; vds=2 is CCF (ccf.v1). |
| Inclusion proof | Evidence that a specific leaf is part of the log at a given size — answers “is my record in the log?” |
| Consistency proof | Evidence that one tree head is an append-only extension of an earlier one — answers “did the log stay honest?” |
| STH | Signed Tree Head — the log's current Merkle root and size, signed, so verifiers and auditors can pin its state. |
| Merkle tree | A hash tree whose root commits to every leaf; the structure behind RFC 9162 inclusion and consistency proofs. |
| RFC 9162 | Certificate Transparency 2.0 — the published RFC whose SHA-256 Merkle proofs back vds=1. |
| CCF | Confidential Consortium Framework — an open-source confidential ledger framework whose receipts back vds=2. |
| Disposition | How an action was disposed, recorded in every capsule — refusals included. Its verdict_class is one of the spec's registered values: executed, blocked, hitl_dispatched, denied, timeout, errored, engine_failure, deferred, needs_decision, expired, escalated, resolved, epoch_boundary. Its decision is accept, reject, needs_input or deferred, and its approver is human, policy or counterparty. Confirmed is not a verdict: it is an effect status (the result was observed), and confirms is a chain relation. This is the one list the site uses. |
Witness vs anchored | On this site a witness is a SCITT Transparency Service that registers checkpoints under a published consistency policy: when a new checkpoint carries a consistency proof, it registers it only if the proof shows it extends the last checkpoint it registered for the same log, and it returns a Receipt. The Receipt proves the checkpoint is in the service's log. It does not mean the service agrees with the records. RFC 9943 has no role called “witness”; the word is this site's name for the service, and “witnessed” means registered with one. anchored is the specification's name for an assurance tier: a record whose chain has been registered with a transparency log, backed by a receipt a verifier has checked. Same event, two vocabularies. The site avoids “anchor” as a verb because it collides with “trust anchor”. The service's source is still named capsule-anchor. |
Go deeper — implementation & usage docs in
capsule-emit: Concepts, in plain words ↗