Envelope
What the actor was allowed to do: the authority it held, who enforced its limits, and the constraints that were supposed to bound it.
Glossary group: The nine layersAnchor:
/glossary/#envelopeEvery case is broken into the same nine parts, in this order. Every control belongs to one of them.
See also · The nine layers
- Mandate
- What the system was told to do: the principal, the objective, and the context in which it was deployed (production, test, demonstration, adversarial).
- Actor
- What acted: the system that took the action, its type, how many of them, and whether it was a defender, an adversary, or a supervisor.
- Inputs
- What the actor could see: the sensors, retrieved content, credentials, and warnings available to it before it acted, including any that were poisoned or degraded.
- Decision
- How the actor chose: the logic, model, or rule that turned inputs into an action, and whether that choice was validated before it ran.
- Action
- What the actor did: the concrete act in the world, with its scale, speed, and reversibility.
- Outcome
- What happened: the state (harm, averted, blocked, pending), its severity, who was affected, the cost, and any regulatory or legal consequence.
- Evidence
- What can be proven: the records that exist, who holds them, and whether the actor's own account is the only witness.
- Recovery
- What could be stopped, undone, and answered for: the automated fallback, the technical recovery, and who was held accountable.
How to cite. Terms in the Register's vocabulary have a stable address: this page, or the anchor /glossary/#envelope on the full glossary. Control definitions are the canonical ones in the controls file; everything else follows schema v0.4.
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