Glossary

Turning a registry from an authority you trust into a source you can audit — by asking multiple independent registries the same question and treating any disagreement as a signal.

The fabric of independent registries and name services an agent can be found through — the NANDA Index, AgentFacts, ANS, DNS-AID, and others. Broad enough to be resilient, so broad it must check itself.

One corroboration pass: for each subject in a watch set, query every configured source the same way, from every vantage, classify each answer, and diff the claims.

The atomic verifiable object: a signed, content-addressed verdict about one subject, carrying subject, observed_at, the per-source per-vantage claims, the verdict, the findings, a staleness_window, and the sweeping_party_identity — Ed25519 over the JCS-canonical body, re-verifiable offline. Implemented by sm-divergence.

The result of a sweep for one subject. AGREE: two or more decisive sources concur. DIVERGENT: they disagree — a finding is raised. INSUFFICIENT: fewer than two decisive claims to compare.

How one source's answer is classified. present: it serves the record. absent: it positively denies it. error: it failed to answer — no claim either way, never counted as a denial.

The observation context a source is asked from — the conditions the answer was obtained under, not the machine that asked. Written class:value from a controlled set (region:de, asn:as64500), so two sweepers mean the same thing by the same label. A source that answers differently across vantages is equivocating unless it declared that it would; the axis exists so intra-source disagreement is attributed correctly.

A context a third party can construct and observe from itself. Region and network are occupiable: a verifier can go there and repeat the observation. Caller identity, tenant, and subscription tier are not — a declaration about one could only be believed, so it is refused.

A subject one source serves and another confirms absent — a record hidden by a registry that chose not to serve it.

Sources agree a subject exists but claim different (unsigned) endpoints for it — the tampering signal.

Sources serve different valid attestations whose key identities (DIDs) disagree — identity equivocation, the thing DID pinning defends against.

A single source whose own answers, seen from different vantages, contradict each other — proof it is telling different callers different things.

A difference a source had published an Answer Scope for, in advance, on an occupiable context. The finding is still raised and the verdict is unchanged — the declaration annotates it and records which revision was matched. It never withdraws a finding.

A source varying a field contrary to a scope it had itself published — a rule published and broken, which is a stronger accusation than an undeclared difference. Specified in -01; it may not be raised without evidence the scope predates the observation, and nothing in the reference implementation establishes that yet.

A finding is suspected when first seen and confirmed once re-observed past the staleness window, so legitimate propagation delay is not mistaken for a lie.

A source-signed bundle declaring which fields it varies and along which context class. It declares an axis, never a mapping: "endpoint varies by region" can be checked by observing from another region, whereas "EU callers get X" is a promise about values made by the party doing the varying.

The discovery on-ramp — bidirectional interop across the NANDA Index, ANS, and DNS-AID — that reaches the sources a sweep compares.

The source-agnostic corroboration kernel: the Resolver and View contract, a pure diff, and the Corroborator.

Divergence detection and the signed Corroboration Record; the reference implementation of draft-chandra-agent-registry-corroboration-01.