Passport Glossary
The words used in this guide, on the passport and in a pipeline’s passport check, each with what it means here.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agent override | A person standing in for the reviewer agents on a whole gate. An exception. Retired as soon as the agents approve the same version themselves |
| Approver role | A reviewer role an organisation’s policy names as allowed to take exceptions to its items |
| Artefact | The thing a passport is about: a work package or a release |
| Assembled passport | The live view: built from the ledger each time it is opened. Not signed |
| Chain | Each ledger entry carries a fingerprint of the entry before it. Intact: every entry follows the last. Broken: one is missing or was changed |
| Control | A requirement from a framework that a checklist item is evidence for |
| Definition of Ready / Done | The two checklists a work package passes: before it is built, and before it completes |
| Deploy token | A per-repository token for a pipeline. Reads that repository’s release passports and reports its deployments and bills of materials; nothing else |
| Deployment report | A pipeline telling the Studio which environment received which commit. Evidence, not a status change |
| DSSE envelope | The standard wrapper holding a signed passport: the content and its signature. The .dsse file |
| Enforce / Warn only | Whether a failed passport check holds a deploy or only reports. Chosen per environment by the studio owner |
| Evidence entry | One line in a ledger, written by the server as the thing happens |
| Evidence ledger | The append-only, chained list of evidence entries for one artefact |
| Exception | A person taking responsibility for an item not being met, with a reason and usually an expiry. In force, expired or voided |
| Expired | An exception whose time ran out. The item is unmet again |
| Gate | A checklist review that a work package must pass before it moves |
| Guardrail policy | An organisation’s required items, release rules and exception rules for its studios. Enterprise |
| Issued passport | A passport frozen at one moment and signed. A numbered version, never rewritten |
| in-toto statement | The standard format of the signed content: it says what the passport is about and carries the passport as its body |
| Legal hold | A record that stops an artefact’s records being deleted. It stops nothing else |
| Lost | An event that could not be recorded when it happened and can no longer be. The passport keeps saying so |
| Passport check | The job in a generated pipeline that verifies a release’s signed passport before a deploy |
| Policy version | A guardrail policy frozen at the moment it was activated. A work package keeps the version it was created under |
| Provenance | Who or what produced a pull request head: the agent, the model, who started the run, and the account the commit was made as |
| Recorded late | An entry written well after its event |
| Release rule | Something an organisation’s policy requires of a release: passing CI, a bill of materials, an approver holding a named role |
| Retired (override) | An agent override that no longer counts because the agents approved the same version themselves |
| Retired (key) | An earlier signing key, still published so the passports it signed still verify |
| Reviewer role | A named group of people who may approve the human side of an item |
| Sample review | A second look, after the fact, at a completed work package the server picked. It never blocks |
| SBOM | Software bill of materials: a list of what a build contains. The Studio records its fingerprint, not the document |
| Seen | A pull request head the Studio did not publish itself. Its producer is unknown |
| Separation of duties | A setting that requires two different people for the two sides of a gate or an item. Off by default |
| Unknown | The record does not say. Never shown as satisfied |
| Unmet | What a verifier reports as not in order on a passport |
| Verifier | Anything that checks a signed passport using only the file and the published keys |
| Voided | An exception cut short by a change to the work package, a new decision, a restart of the review, or a renewal |
| Waiver | An exception to one item: it does not apply to this change |