Glossary

<h1>ᚾ&nbsp;NornGate — Glossary</h1>

Terms of art used across the docs. Each links to the page that owns the full detail.

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ᛗ Platform terms

Term	Definition
ABAC	Attribute-Based Access Control — policy decides on subject/resource/action/environment attributes, not roles alone. Gates & Attributes
Approval budget	The per-tenant allowance debited at G2; the lever that keeps human-in-the-loop transits under ~5% of traffic.
Arbitration (G4)	The final gate: resolves concurrent write conflicts deterministically, commits exactly once, records the outcome. The Five Gates
Attribute	A fact about the subject, resource, action, or environment used in a decision — authoritatively sourced, never self-asserted.
Billable outcome	A G4-committed side effect recorded to Urd with billable: true; the unit of per-outcome billing.
Checkpoint	A periodic signed chain-head of the Urd ledger; the Ragnarök recovery seed and the verify-from-checkpoint anchor.
Credential starvation	Agents hold no raw credentials; keys stay in the gateway and inject only into a committed action, so an agent cannot act off-path. Security & Fail-closed
Crypto-shredding	Erasing PII by deleting its per-subject key; the hash chain survives because it commits to ciphertext, not plaintext. Urd Ledger
Decision record	A per-gate verdict written to Urd.
Default-deny	The ground state — anything not explicitly allowed is denied.
Degraded mode (graded)	Under a central-dependency outage, read-only/pre-authorized actions continue on cached snapshots while fresh G1/G2 denies — availability by risk class, never by opening gates.
Deliberation budget	The per-agent knowledge/token allowance enforced at G1 (Mimir's well); exceeding it denies or escalates.
Deny ceiling	A gate timeout that resolves to denial, not a latency target.
Deny-overrides	The rule-combining algorithm — a matching deny beats any allow.
Deterministic execution	A verdict is a pure function of (request, policy, state, config); identical inputs yield identical verdicts, enabling replay. Deterministic Execution
Ed25519	The signature scheme for Urd records and receipts (RFC 8032).
Egress control	Per-realm network policy + brokered proxy preventing a workload from opening a side channel out of the mesh.
Fail-closed	Any non-ALLOW — deny, timeout, error, unknown — stops the request.
Fencing token	A G3 state snapshot that G4 re-checks at commit; a stale token is rejected, closing the TOCTOU gap.
Gate (G0–G4)	One of the five ordered checks a request passes before commit.
HSM	The hardware module in Asgard holding the Urd signing key, off the worker path.
Idempotency key	A caller-supplied key that makes a repeated request return the already-committed outcome (exactly-once at G4).
Ingress (G0)	The first gate: authentication (SPIFFE), rate limits, allowlists, request shape.
Lease	An ownership claim on a resource at G4; a writer without it is denied 409.
mTLS	Mutual TLS on every hop, keyed by SPIFFE identity.
Norns	Urðr (past → ledger), Verðandi (present → metrics), Skuld (future → forecasting) — the observability triad.
Obligation	A condition attached to an allow (e.g. require:approval), so decision and downstream requirement are one recorded unit.
Outcome record	A G4 commit record; carries the billable flag and the signed-receipt basis.
Per-outcome billing	Charging per G4-verified outcome, not per token; the signed receipt is the basis.
Policy (G1)	The gate that evaluates ABAC/RBAC rules — default-deny, deny-overrides, deterministic, no LLM in the decision.
Realm	A trust zone bound to a subdomain; the topology is the threat model. The Nine Worlds
Receipt	A signed Urd outcome record a tenant can verify independently against the ledger public key.
Route timeout	A per-realm upstream request timeout (e.g. Muspelheim 300s) — distinct from a gate timeout.
Sandbox (G3)	Isolated execution (Firecracker microVM) that validates before commit; irreversible actions are prepared here and committed once at G4.
Snapshot	The pinned, identified inputs (policy/state/config) recorded with a verdict for replay.
Spine (Yggdrasil)	The single control path all traffic crosses — enforced by distributed Envoy sidecars + istiod. The Spine
SVID	A short-lived SPIFFE workload identity (≤24h, hourly rotation).
Tamper-evident	Modification is detectable (broken chain / bad signature) — distinct from tamper-proof, which a centralized ledger is not unless the key is externally held.
TOCTOU	Time-of-check-to-time-of-use — the gap between G3 validation and G4 commit, closed by the fencing token.
Total mediation	Every side-effecting path routes through the spine and gates; a single un-mediated path voids all five gates.
Trust zone	See Realm.
Urd	The centralized, append-only, Ed25519-signed hash-chained audit ledger. Urd Ledger
Verifiable receipt	See Receipt.
Yggdrasil	See Spine.

References. SPIFFE/SPIRE, Ed25519 / RFC 8032, RFC 6962 (append-only log), NIST SP 800-162 (ABAC), GDPR Art. 17. Naming doctrine: Prose Edda / Poetic Edda.

ᚾ NornGate — Glossary

Terms of art used across the docs. Each links to the page that owns the full detail.

---

ᛗ Platform terms

Term	Definition
ABAC	Attribute-Based Access Control — policy decides on subject/resource/action/environment attributes, not roles alone. [Gates & Attributes](Gates-and-Attributes)
Approval budget	The per-tenant allowance debited at G2; the lever that keeps human-in-the-loop transits under ~5% of traffic.
Arbitration (G4)	The final gate: resolves concurrent write conflicts deterministically, commits exactly once, records the outcome. [The Five Gates](The-Five-Gates)
Attribute	A fact about the subject, resource, action, or environment used in a decision — authoritatively sourced, never self-asserted.
Billable outcome	A G4-committed side effect recorded to Urd with billable: true; the unit of per-outcome billing.
Checkpoint	A periodic signed chain-head of the Urd ledger; the Ragnarök recovery seed and the verify-from-checkpoint anchor.
Credential starvation	Agents hold no raw credentials; keys stay in the gateway and inject only into a committed action, so an agent cannot act off-path. [Security & Fail-closed](Security-and-Fail-Closed)
Crypto-shredding	Erasing PII by deleting its per-subject key; the hash chain survives because it commits to ciphertext, not plaintext. [Urd Ledger](Urd-Ledger)
Decision record	A per-gate verdict written to Urd.
Default-deny	The ground state — anything not explicitly allowed is denied.
Degraded mode (graded)	Under a central-dependency outage, read-only/pre-authorized actions continue on cached snapshots while fresh G1/G2 denies — availability by risk class, never by opening gates.
Deliberation budget	The per-agent knowledge/token allowance enforced at G1 (Mimir's well); exceeding it denies or escalates.
Deny ceiling	A gate timeout that resolves to denial, not a latency target.
Deny-overrides	The rule-combining algorithm — a matching deny beats any allow.
Deterministic execution	A verdict is a pure function of (request, policy, state, config); identical inputs yield identical verdicts, enabling replay. [Deterministic Execution](Deterministic-Execution)
Ed25519	The signature scheme for Urd records and receipts (RFC 8032).
Egress control	Per-realm network policy + brokered proxy preventing a workload from opening a side channel out of the mesh.
Fail-closed	Any non-ALLOW — deny, timeout, error, unknown — stops the request.
Fencing token	A G3 state snapshot that G4 re-checks at commit; a stale token is rejected, closing the TOCTOU gap.
Gate (G0–G4)	One of the five ordered checks a request passes before commit.
HSM	The hardware module in Asgard holding the Urd signing key, off the worker path.
Idempotency key	A caller-supplied key that makes a repeated request return the already-committed outcome (exactly-once at G4).
Ingress (G0)	The first gate: authentication (SPIFFE), rate limits, allowlists, request shape.
Lease	An ownership claim on a resource at G4; a writer without it is denied 409.
mTLS	Mutual TLS on every hop, keyed by SPIFFE identity.
Norns	Urðr (past → ledger), Verðandi (present → metrics), Skuld (future → forecasting) — the observability triad.
Obligation	A condition attached to an allow (e.g. require:approval), so decision and downstream requirement are one recorded unit.
Outcome record	A G4 commit record; carries the billable flag and the signed-receipt basis.
Per-outcome billing	Charging per G4-verified outcome, not per token; the signed receipt is the basis.
Policy (G1)	The gate that evaluates ABAC/RBAC rules — default-deny, deny-overrides, deterministic, no LLM in the decision.
Realm	A trust zone bound to a subdomain; the topology is the threat model. [The Nine Worlds](The-Nine-Worlds)
Receipt	A signed Urd outcome record a tenant can verify independently against the ledger public key.
Route timeout	A per-realm upstream request timeout (e.g. Muspelheim 300s) — distinct from a gate timeout.
Sandbox (G3)	Isolated execution (Firecracker microVM) that validates before commit; irreversible actions are prepared here and committed once at G4.
Snapshot	The pinned, identified inputs (policy/state/config) recorded with a verdict for replay.
Spine (Yggdrasil)	The single control path all traffic crosses — enforced by distributed Envoy sidecars + istiod. [The Spine](The-Spine)
SVID	A short-lived SPIFFE workload identity (≤24h, hourly rotation).
Tamper-evident	Modification is detectable (broken chain / bad signature) — distinct from tamper-proof, which a centralized ledger is not unless the key is externally held.
TOCTOU	Time-of-check-to-time-of-use — the gap between G3 validation and G4 commit, closed by the fencing token.
Total mediation	Every side-effecting path routes through the spine and gates; a single un-mediated path voids all five gates.
Trust zone	See Realm.
Urd	The centralized, append-only, Ed25519-signed hash-chained audit ledger. [Urd Ledger](Urd-Ledger)
Verifiable receipt	See Receipt.
Yggdrasil	See Spine.

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ᛖ Norse → system

The naming is load-bearing: each myth maps to a mechanism. Full rationale on [Norse Cosmology & Platform Design](Norse-Cosmology-and-Platform-Design); agent roles on [Agent Registry](Agent-Registry).

Norse	System
Yggdrasil	Service-mesh control spine
The Nine Worlds / realms	Trust zones (subdomains)
Norns — Urðr / Verðandi / Skuld	Ledger / metrics / forecasting
Urðarbrunnr (Well of Urd)	Observability + audit
Mímisbrunnr (Mimir's Well)	Knowledge base + deliberation budget
Hvergelmir / Níðhöggr	Entropy: checksums, chaos
Ratatoskr	Event bus (Kafka)
Heimdall	Ingress (G0)
Týr	Policy (G1)
Forseti	Arbitration (G4)
Óðinn	Planner
Huginn / Muninn	Retrieval / memory
Thor	Idempotent executor
Loki	Chaos / red-team
Hermóðr	Dead-letter reprocessing (Hel)
Baldr	The default-deny parable
Ragnarök	Disaster-recovery drill
Valhalla	Completed-job archive realm

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ᚱ Next steps

• [Reference](Reference) — quick-reference tables.
• [Error Codes](Error-Codes) — status and failure codes.
• [Core Concepts](Core-Concepts) — the foundations behind these terms.
• [Norse Cosmology & Platform Design](Norse-Cosmology-and-Platform-Design) — the naming doctrine.

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Iconography

Section glyphs are Elder Futhark runes (Unicode Runic block, U+16A0–U+16FF) — semantic, not emoji. Full set on [Home](Home#iconography):

Rune	Name	Gloss	Marks
ᚾ	Nauðiz	need, constraint	the platform mark
ᛗ	Mannaz	the record, knowledge	platform terms
ᛖ	Ehwaz	the bridge between	Norse → system
ᚱ	Raidō	the ride, the road	next steps

References. [SPIFFE](https://spiffe.io/)/SPIRE, [Ed25519 / RFC 8032](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8032), [RFC 6962](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962) (append-only log), [NIST SP 800-162](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/162/final) (ABAC), [GDPR Art. 17](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/). Naming doctrine: Prose Edda / Poetic Edda.