Glossary

One name for each thing. The site, the docs, the dashboard, and the CLI use these words in these senses.

Products and places

term	meaning
Components	The parts of agent-custody: the gateway, the door, the egress witness, the SDK hooks, the log, and the rest. Components says which you need.
Dashboard	The web app at app.agent-custody.dev where you sign up, create API keys, and see your usage.
Gateway console	The local admin page for one gateway: its checks, its policy, and the audit of changes (gateway console).
Hosted log	The log we run for you, one tenant per customer (hosted log).
Verify a receipt	Check a receipt offline with public keys, on the command line or in the browser.

Accounts and keys

term	meaning
API key	The secret your gateway presents to append to your tenant on the hosted log. It is shown once and stored only as a hash.
Sign in, Sign up	Open the dashboard with an existing account, or create one.
Tenant	One customer's log on the hosted log, with its own API keys, plan, and audit.

Receipts and evidence

term	meaning
Bundle	A receipt with the tree head and inclusion proof that place it in the log: the file a verifier checks.
Capture rule, commitment	A rule that keeps a field out of the receipt. A commitment is the salted hash left in its place, which proves the value later without revealing it.
DSSE	Dead Simple Signing Envelope: the signed wrapper around each receipt, so any change to it breaks the signature.
Issuer	What signed a receipt: a gateway, a door, an egress witness, an SDK hook, or a guardian. The verifier says first what each kind is worth (verification).
Provenance	The label on each field of a receipt: attested (signed by someone other than the issuer), observed (seen by the issuer itself), or claimed (the agent's word).
Receipt	A signed record of one tool call: who made it, for whom, with which arguments, what the policy decided, and what happened.

Authority and policy

term	meaning
Cedar	The policy language the gateway uses by default to allow or deny each call. Rego, from Open Policy Agent, is the other one it reads (policies).
Grant	A statement, signed by the principal, of what an agent may do and until when. The gateway checks it on every call.
Observe mode	The policy decides and the decision is recorded, but nothing is blocked. Use it until the policy is right.
Policy digest	The SHA-256 of the policy file, written into every receipt, so a verifier knows which policy decided.
Principal	The person or organisation an agent acts for, and whose key signs its grant.

The log

term	meaning
Anchor	A checkpoint's root written to a public blockchain, so that rewriting the log would mean rewriting the chain too (anchoring).
Append	Writing one receipt's hash to the log. Plans count appends.
Checkpoint	A tree head published apart from the log at intervals, so anyone can check later that the log was never rewritten.
Inclusion proof	The hashes that show one leaf is in the log under a given tree head.
Leaf	One entry in the log: the hash of one receipt.
Log	An append-only Merkle tree of receipt hashes (RFC 9162), the way Certificate Transparency keeps certificates.
Tree head	The log's size and root hash, signed with the log's key.
Witness	An independent party that checks each new checkpoint extends the last one, then cosigns it.