Reference
Glossary
Every term that carries a specific meaning in Selah, defined once.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| AOP, Agent Operating Procedure | The unit of governance. A structured, versioned, machine-enforceable statement of what an agent may do and say, and what happens otherwise. Authored as action policies across five layers, the response rules in the output configuration, and the packs you enable. |
| AOP Runtime | The deterministic engine component that resolves and enforces AOPs on the hot path, returning permit, hold, or deny in well under ten milliseconds. |
| Shadow AOP Ledger | The record built in shadow mode of what your AOPs would have decided, without enforcing. Realized as the shadow-flagged decision records plus review items. Your proof and your raw material for authoring AOPs. |
| Shadow mode | A per-tenant mode where decisions are computed and recorded but nothing is blocked, so you can calibrate before enforcing. |
| Enforcement | When Selah moves from recording to acting: a deny stops something for real and a hold waits for a person. |
| The five layers | The precedence order for AOP resolution: compliance, jurisdiction, agent type, base, campaign, highest to lowest. |
| Pack | A versioned bundle of AOPs for an industry or jurisdiction that you enable. Compliance and jurisdiction packs are the first form of the AOP library. |
| Compliance Library | The universal baseline of AOPs plus the packs. The mechanism for reusing governance across tenants. |
| The three moments | Input, action, and response, the three points at which the engine governs, with endpoints gate/check, evaluate, and validate/output. |
| Permit, hold, deny | The three verdicts. Returned as allow, escalate, block for the input and response checks, which map to permit, hold, deny. |
| Inversion of control | The model where the agent proposes, the engine decides, and connectors execute, so the agent never holds credentials or acts on its own. |
| Connector | The Selah-side component that executes a permitted action against an external system, only against a valid permit, with encrypted write-only credentials. |
| Fail-closed, fail-open | Fail-closed denies when it cannot decide, used on the action path and the hard response rules. Fail-open allows and records, used on the input check and the response model layer. |
| Tenant type | enterprise, platform, or private, which changes how escalations are handled, not the decision logic. |
| Sub-tenant | For a platform tenant, one of your customers, set up under your parent account with its own AOPs. |
| Nested tenancy | The model where one parent tenant holds many sub-tenants, each governed independently. |
| ActionEnvelope | The structured action an agent proposes to the action check: agent, action, parameters, context. |
| Decision identifier | The reference returned with a permit, required by a connector to execute the permitted action. |
| Audit chain | The append-only, hash-chained decision record. Tamper-evident. Personal data is kept out of it by architecture. |
| Scope | What an API key may reach: evaluate for the data plane, manage for tenant configuration, admin for the administrative surface. |