Glossary

These are the terms used across the Asqav documentation for signed AI agent audit trails. Each definition links to the page that covers it in depth.

Receipts and records

Agent receipt

A signed record of one action an AI agent took: the principal, the action, the request and result digests, the time and the policy decision that gated it. Anyone holding it can check it against a public key. See Verifiable Agent Receipts.

Audit trail

The receipts an agent produced, listed by session and in order, with each agent's receipts linked in a hash chain. See Sessions.

Hash chain

The link between one agent's receipts: a SHA-256 chain over the JCS-canonical signed payload that starts from an all-zero genesis value, so a removed, inserted or reordered receipt breaks it. See IETF Internet-Draft for AI Compliance Receipts.

Tamper-evident

A record is tamper-evident when any change to it can be detected, for example because a signature check fails. It does not mean the change is prevented. See Tamper-Evident Logs for AI Agents.

Code-authorship receipt

A signed record that a specific code change existed at a point in time. The authoritative tier fetches the commit from GitHub, derives the diff itself and signs the SHA-256 of the bytes it derived. See Code-authorship receipts.

Audit pack

One file holding the evidence for a time range, exported with asqav audit-pack export. It verifies offline against the same public key as the receipts in it. See CLI Reference.

Signatures and time

ML-DSA-65

A post-quantum digital signature scheme standardized by NIST in FIPS 204. Asqav signs receipts with it, and Ed25519 is available for shorter retention windows. See Post-quantum Signed Receipts for AI Tool Calls.

Anchors

The time witnesses on a receipt: an RFC 3161-shaped timestamp token Asqav signs with ML-DSA-65, and an OpenTimestamps proof in the Bitcoin blockchain that is independent of both the operator and Asqav. See Multi-Witness Anchoring.

JCS (RFC 8785)

The JSON Canonicalization Scheme. It gives one JSON value exactly one byte form, so a verifier rebuilds the bytes the signer signed and the Python and TypeScript SDKs hash identically. See Fingerprint Spec.

Action fingerprint

The SHA-256 of the JCS-canonical {action_type, context} pair, computed before the action is signed. See Fingerprint Spec.

Unaffiliated signer

A signer that is neither the agent vendor nor the regulated entity. Asqav signs receipts as that party, which several record-retention rules ask for. See Asqav as Third-Party Notary.

Verification

Independent verification

Checking a receipt with the retained signed bytes, trusted public-key material and the open verifier, with no Asqav account and without calling Asqav. See Independent Verification of an Asqav Receipt.

JWKS

The JSON Web Key Set at /.well-known/jwks.json that publishes Asqav's verify keys. A verifier checks a receipt signature against it. See Verifiable Agent Receipts.

Offline verification

Verifying receipts on a machine with no network access, using a snapshot of the public key set taken while online. See Offline and Air-Gapped Verification.

Capture and policy

Capture topology

An optional field naming where the producer captured an action, such as in_process_sdk or passive_telemetry. It is recorded on the manifest, not on the signed payload. See Capture Topology.

Policy decision

The outcome a policy assigns to an action matched by its action_pattern, recorded on the receipt the action produced. See Policies.

Scope token

A token signed with the agent's ML-DSA key that limits the agent to a set of actions for a set time. An action outside its scope is rejected by the policy engine. See Tokens.

Standards

draft-marques-asqav-compliance-receipts

The IETF Internet-Draft that profiles the Asqav receipt format. It is a draft, not an adopted IETF standard. See IETF Internet-Draft for AI Compliance Receipts.

SCITT

Supply Chain Integrity, Transparency and Trust, the IETF working group for transparency services that append signed statements to a log and return inclusion proofs. Asqav exports receipts as COSE_Sign1 envelopes for these services. See ML-DSA receipts in COSE for SCITT transparency services.

EU AI Act Article 12

The record-keeping article for high-risk AI systems, which must allow automatic recording of events over their lifetime. It applies from 2 December 2027 for Annex III systems and from 2 August 2028 for Annex I systems. See EU AI Act Article 12: Record-Keeping Mapped to Receipts.

References