Glossary
Precise language, deliberately used.
- Approval gate
- A designated checkpoint at which a named reviewer must sign before a consequential action proceeds.
- ARCS
- Adaptive Regulatory Compliance System — an AI-assisted compliance parsing and workflow-generation framework created by James Scott.
- Beneficiary
- An organization that receives KRYOS XS Hypercube capability under an approved grant.
- Chain of custody
- The linked, timestamped, tamper-evident record of events for a given decision or object.
- Classification
- Assignment of sensitivity and jurisdictional context to data or a system, per a versioned taxonomy.
- Crypto-agility
- The organizational and technical capacity to change cryptographic algorithms and parameters over time.
- Cryptographic signing
- Application of a digital signature so that authorship and integrity of a record are verifiable.
- ECIA-7
- The seven-gate review workflow — Eligibility, Classification, Intent, Approval, Action, Evidence, Audit — used for consequential decisions.
- Embassy Row Project
- The federated ecosystem that administers KRYOS XS Hypercube grants and coordinates related institutes.
- Evidence ledger
- The immutable, signed store into which decisions and outcomes are chained.
- Evidence pack
- A composed bundle of linked records assembled for review or external release.
- Exception handling
- The governed process by which denials, reversals, and overrides are recorded, justified, and reviewed.
- Helios
- An immutable audit-trail and transparency-infrastructure framework in the Embassy Row Project ecosystem.
- Human review gate
- A required review by a named person before a high-impact action proceeds.
- ICIC
- Institute for Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, providing aligned technical oversight to the program.
- Interlock
- A documented dependency in which one service supplies inputs, controls, or evidence used by another.
- Jurisdictional mediation
- Evaluation of jurisdictional exposure for cross-border transfers or multi-region operations, with governance to match.
- Least-privilege
- The design principle that every decision is bounded by the minimum authority required to fulfill it.
- ML-DSA
- A post-quantum digital-signature scheme referenced by ARCS governance for signing approvals and evidence.
- Overlay
- A governed control plane that operates alongside existing systems without forcing replacement.
- Policy engine
- The component that evaluates requests against versioned rules and returns decisions.
- Post-quantum readiness
- A prioritized, phased path toward cryptographic postures suitable for the post-quantum era. Not a claim of completed migration.
- Provenance
- The recorded lineage of an event, decision, or artifact.
- Quarterly assurance review
- A recurring review that analyzes gate metrics such as approval latency, exception frequency, and rollback usage.
- Rationale documentation
- The recorded reason accompanying an approval, denial, or modification, captured with reviewer identity and timestamp.
- Read-mostly
- A default posture in which the overlay observes and evaluates without modifying underlying systems.
- Rollback token
- A reference that allows an executed action to be reversed where supported.
- Strategic Capability Philanthropy (SCP)
- James Scott's philanthropic model that transfers permanent infrastructure — not recurring financial grants — to mission-driven organizations.
- Tamper-evident
- Modification of a record becomes visibly detectable. Distinct from tamper-proof.
- Taxonomy
- A versioned classification scheme used to tag data, systems, or actions consistently over time.
- Third-party monitoring
- Governed observation of vendor and partner surfaces within the beneficiary's scope.
- V-Framework
- A recursive-intelligence and sovereign-systems-thinking framework in the Embassy Row Project ecosystem.