Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Passage | One audited sign-in through the Gate. It is the unit Obelisk meters and bills — you pay per person actually let in, not per stored account. |
| Receipt | An append-only, hash-chained record of a privileged action. Receipts chain to a fixed genesis constant, so a deleted or reordered row is detectable rather than merely unlikely. |
| Assurance | How a session was proved: verified (a passkey), totp, magic link, break-glass, remembered, or federated. Sensitive actions accept only two of these — a passkey sign-in, or a break-glass recovery session — so a session proved by an authenticator code, an emailed link, a remembered sign-in or a federated sign-on must sign in with a passkey again before it can add or remove passkeys, mint an API key, register an agent, or delete the account. |
| Step-up | Asking for a stronger proof before a specific action, rather than blocking the session outright. A magic-link session can read your account and must pass a passkey check to change your credentials. |
| Grant | A short-lived, scoped authorization issued to an agent or an API key. Grants expire on their own; revoking one does not require finding everywhere it was used. |
| DPoP | Demonstrating Proof-of-Possession (RFC 9449). Binds a token to a key the holder must prove control of, so a stolen bearer token alone is not enough to use it. |
| Macaroon | A capability token that can be attenuated — a holder can hand on a strictly weaker version without asking the issuer. Obelisk sessions are macaroons, which is why a session can be narrowed but never widened. |
| Relying party | A project that sends people to the Gate to sign in and receives them back. Registering one is what makes its return URL legitimate. |
| CIMD | Client ID Metadata Documents. An https client_id resolves to a metadata document, so a client can identify itself without a registration record. Its redirect address must still be one the Gate allows. |
| CAEP | Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol, part of Shared Signals (RFC 8417). When a session is revoked or a credential changes, Obelisk emits a security event token so relying parties learn immediately instead of at the next token refresh. |
| Proof Link | A revocable public page describing an agent's independently-checkable claims — key control, an accountable owner, runtime evidence. Deliberately a vector of bounded claims, never a single verdict about whether something is human. |
| Obelisk Rating | A 0-100 score of an organization's security posture, computed from evidence rather than self-report, and always reported alongside its coverage — how much was actually measured. |
| Coverage | The fraction of a Rating's dimensions that were actually measured. A high score over thin coverage is a weaker claim than a middling score over full coverage. |
| Account Shield | The same idea as the Rating, aimed at one person's own account: passkeys, a backup passkey (the recovery that works, and the heaviest weight), an authenticator app, and alerts that can really be delivered. Recovery codes are not scored while this Gate does not accept them for sign-in. |
| Signed ledger head | The latest head of Obelisk's audit ledgers, published at /.well-known/obelisk-transparency.json and signed with our ES256 key. Save it with its anchor count and compare later: the count must never go down, and while the count is the one you saved, the head must not change. We don't publish consistency proofs yet, so this can't show that a later head extends the one you saved. |
| Break-glass | The founder's last-resort access path, deliberately narrow and heavily receipted. It exists so that losing every device is survivable, and it can never perform a step-up-bound action. |
Where these appear
Most of these are load-bearing on the integration docs, the trust model and the security posture. If a word on this site is doing work and is not defined here, that is a documentation bug — tell us.
Machines: the same vocabulary drives /llms.txt and /agents.json.