Glossary

A signed, per-reporter hash-chained accusation citing existing evidence by hash. Proves an accountable accusation was made; never adjudicates it. Reference implementation: sm-abuse-report.

The thirteen-field signed JSON object: protocol, reporter_id, accused_id, accused_role, category, evidence_refs, narrative, delegation_position, delegation_ref, prev_hash, issued_at, sig, pubkey. See What is an Abuse Report.

Which side stands accused: agent or principal. The field that makes the schema bidirectional without needing two report types.

A closed, versioned vocabulary naming the kind of harm, or other — where narrative carries the substantive claim. See the taxonomy on What is an Abuse Report.

A non-empty array of {type, hash} pointers to existing sm-arp receipts or sm-aae envelopes — never a bundled copy of the artifact. A report may cite more than one.

The reporter's required free-text account. Load-bearing when category is other.

upstream, downstream, lateral, or null — where the accused sits relative to the filer in the delegation topology. Orthogonal to accused_role: this is topology, not ontology. Self-asserted, not independently verified.

A hash pointer to the DAT that authorized the filer to act, or null for standing authority — the same semantics as sm-arp's own authority_chain. Lets a verifier trace a delegated agent's report back to the human who authorized it.

A separate, eight-field signed object — not a report variant — a reporter withdrawing one of their own prior reports by hash, with a required reason. Shares the reporter's report chain. Permanent: no un-retraction, no partial retraction of a single citation. Never invalidates the original — verify_report on it still returns true.

The retraction's pointer to the report being withdrawn — the target report's own report_hash.

The hex SHA-256 of this reporter's previous report or retraction, or null for their first signed artifact. What chains one accusation — or withdrawal — to the next.

The lowercase-hex SHA-256 of the full signed document (including sig) — the value a successor's prev_hash points at. Identical computation for either kind.

A reporter's reports and retractions linked genesis-first by prev_hash, one unified sequence per reporter. Reconstructed by order_chain, which returns the ordering or rejects a set that isn't exactly one intact chain.

Resolver over an already-ordered chain: returns the report hashes currently retracted. A report is retracted iff a later valid retraction in that same chain names it.

The deterministic serialization the signature covers: sorted-key, compact-separator JSON over the report with sig removed, UTF-8 encoded. Identical inputs always produce byte-identical canonical bytes.

The three chain defects order_chain rejects: a missing interior item (report or retraction), two items claiming the same predecessor, and a prev_hash that reaches into another reporter's chain, respectively.

The four possible results of verify_evidence_citation, run by a verifier who holds the cited artifact: the citation checks out, the hash doesn't match, the declared type doesn't match, or the reporter isn't actually a party to the artifact.

The state of a citation nobody has checked because the verifier doesn't hold the cited artifact — distinct from both confirmed and any failure result. Not a bug; an honest reflection of what wasn't checkable.

Agency Receipt Protocol — the signed receipt envelope: what an agent did. See Primitives.

Attested Action Envelope — the signed, per-agent-chained record of a pre-action authorization verdict.

Delegated Authority Token — the principal-signed grant defining what an agent was allowed to do.

Portable Reputation Credential — portable reputation computed over an agent's ARP receipt history (package sm-rep). A named, not-yet-wired future direction for abuse reports.