Authority
The permission assigned to a person, object or system to initiate, approve or influence a defined action.
Public glossary
A common language
for physical trust.
Terms used across the 4SI platform, papers and deployment discussions — defined at a level that supports understanding without exposing protected mechanisms.
Precision begins with
shared meaning.
This glossary distinguishes identity from authority, verification from decision and infrastructure from an individual product form.
PERMISSION / SCOPE
Assurance level
The degree of confidence required for a verification decision in a particular operating and threat context.
Binding
The governed relationship connecting a physical person, object or asset to the identity or record used by a system.
Control primitive
A foundational mechanism other systems can use to constrain whether a consequential action is permitted to proceed.
Enrollment
The controlled process through which a trust relationship is established, approved and made available for later verification.
Execution boundary
The point at which information, instruction or authorization becomes an action with consequences in a digital or physical system.
High-consequence action
An action whose incorrect authorization could create material harm, loss, disruption or systemic exposure.
Human presence
Evidence that an expected person is physically participating at the moment an authorization or verification is required.
Lifecycle verification
Maintaining and reviewing trust across enrollment, use, transfer, exception, revocation and retirement.
Physical anchor
The physically verifiable source to which a trust relationship is connected. Public descriptions address its role, not its protected construction.
Physical trust
Confidence grounded in a verifiable relationship with a real person, object or environment rather than exclusively digital information.
Policy engine
The system that interprets verification results and context to determine whether an action is allowed, denied or escalated.
Reality verification
The process of establishing a physically grounded claim before a digital system relies on that claim for a consequential decision.
Substitution
The replacement of an expected person, component, product or asset with another that attempts to inherit its authority or record.
Synthetic identity
An identity claim assembled or generated from digital information that may not correspond reliably to the expected real person.
Trust event
A recorded point at which physical verification produces a result for an authorized workflow or decision.
Verification coverage
The share of relevant authority paths, assets or actions for which the required verification control is actually enforced.
Verification result
The bounded output delivered to an authorized system. It should communicate only what the decision requires and no broader claim.