Glossary
Informative. Normative definitions are in SPEC.md, Section 2.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Bad Canary | A canary carrying a real adversary technique (MITRE ATT&CK or ATLAS) that produces a defined malicious effect if not stopped. |
| Good Canary | A canary performing a legitimate action that produces a defined benign effect if not stopped. |
| Boundary Good Canary | A good canary built to look like a bad one. Measures false blocks where they actually happen. |
| Proof Swarm | The full, blind-mixed set of good and bad canaries for one run. |
| Agent Under Test (AUT) | An agent inside the SUT whose own conduct is under test; the fourth attribution level. An actor, not a control. Its conduct is attributed under PP-SPEC-078 (No Bros Jail Mode Protocol: The Jailed Canary Protocol). Derived from Technical Marketing (2008) DUT/SUT. |
| Control Under Test (CUT) | One control inside a DUT: a single rule, policy, signature, detection, or guardrail function. |
| Device Under Test (DUT) | A security product, configuration, or agent guardrail containing one or more CUTs. Term from Technical Marketing (2008). |
| Solution Under Test (SUT) | The full deployment the Proof Swarm enters: one or more DUTs plus the protected environment and its Effect Points. Term from Technical Marketing (2008). |
| Differential Attribution | Proving a single CUT stopped an attack by matched runs with the CUT active and with it disabled. A DUT log naming the control is not enough. |
| CUT Fingerprint | Independent hash of one control's definition and parameters. |
| Provider | Whoever builds, sells, or operates the DUT. |
| Issuer | Builds the Proof Swarm, holds the labels, publishes commitments. Never the Provider. |
| Effect Point | Where a canary's effect lands: target host, data store, identity system, egress sink, agent tool output. |
| Proof Witness | The standby, independent, out-of-band observer at the Effect Point. Records which canaries lived and died. |
| Ingress Observer | Passive observer at the release point. Proves delivery. |
| Time Anchor | External public time and randomness source, such as the NIST Randomness Beacon. |
| Commitment | Hash of a canary, its label, expected effect, flags, and a nonce, published before release. |
| Reveal | Publication of commitment preimages after the run, so anyone can check nothing changed. |
| Stopped | Bad canary died. |
| Missed | Bad canary lived, regardless of any alert. |
| Passed | Good canary lived. |
| False Block | Good canary died. |
| Unit of Proof (UoP) | The adjudicated outcome of one bad canary in a valid run. |
| Mutation | A fresh variant of a technique, generated per run. |
| Holdout Canary | A private, never-published variant. |
| Embargoed Canary | A canary exploiting an undisclosed vulnerability. Committed now, revealed after coordinated disclosure. |
| Wild Canary | An effect the Proof Witness sees that matches no committed canary. A real-world event. |
| DUT Fingerprint | Independent hash of the exact deployed state of the control: version, config, policy, rules, and for AI controls, model, prompt, and tool permissions. |
| Stale | A result whose DUT Fingerprint no longer matches the deployed control. |
| Trickle | Continuous low-volume canary release between full runs. |
| Control / Environment / Threat / Witness Drift | Change in the control, the environment, the threat landscape, or the witness over time. |
| Silent Drift | Measured behavior changes while the fingerprint stays the same. Something changed that nobody declared. |
| Black Hole | Part of the system disappears for any period, from network, node, or system failure unrelated to any canary or attack. |
| Void (black hole) | A canary released into a black hole. Never scored, never backfilled. |
| Black Hole Rate | Share of canaries and time lost to black holes. Published with every result. |
| Witness Coverage Map | The declared Effect Points and effect types the Proof Witness watches. Everything else is a blind spot. |
| Bounded Mode | A scheduled test run with declared start and end times, a fixed committed Proof Swarm, sealed records, and a publishable point-in-time report. |
| Production Stream Mode | Continuous canary release into live traffic with rolling epoch-based commitments, no declared end, and ongoing result series tracking drift and changes. |
| Roost | The Proof Witness's standby state between and after runs. |
| Molt | A DUT or CUT Fingerprint change. Prior results go stale. |
| Clutch | One epoch's committed batch of canaries in Production Stream Mode. |
| Color | What kind of canary it is: White, Gray, Red, Black, Gold. Sealed before release. Wild canaries have no color; they were never committed. |
| Path | Where the canary goes and how it is sent: ingress, effect token, route, effect point, target, cadence, clutch. Sealed before release. |
| Outcome | What happened: Stopped, Missed, Passed, False block, Void, Undelivered, Sealed. Assigned once, after the fact. |
| Effect Token | Unique per-canary identifier visible at the Effect Point. Matches an observation to its canary after reveal. No token means wild. |
| Gold Canary | A bad canary testing a technique the Provider claims in writing to stop. Gold Missed is a Claim Finding. |
| Claim Accuracy Rate | Gold Stopped over all Gold. The Provider's own claims graded against outcome. |
| Registry | The append-only public ledger results are published to, per PP-SPEC-004 (ProofRegister API). Public instance: proofregister.com. |
| Integration Point (IP-n) | A named seam a third-party component plugs into, with its own MUSTs, evidence, and conformance claim (Section 18). |
| Component Fingerprint | Hash of a component's build, version, and deployed configuration, captured independently. The testing equipment is fingerprinted like the DUT. |
| Interface Manifest | Published before release: who occupies each seam, with product, version, fingerprint, and interests. |
| Absence Ladder | Blind (witness not looking), Void (witness looking, path gone), Null (witness looking, path up, nothing landed). Only Null scores. |
| Blind | A canary committed to an Effect Point outside the coverage map. Never scored; a finding against the plan. |
| Degraded | A Production Stream series whose Blind plus Void share stayed over threshold for the declared number of clutches. Not proof for those clutches. |
| Verification | Self-attestation. Baseline tier. |
| Validation | One step above verification. |
| Proof | A sealed, witnessed, anchored record of outcome under adversarial conditions, built from independent evidence. Evidence is not proof; proof contains evidence. |