Glossary
Glossary
Terms used across the site.
- Compartmentalization
- Dividing a facility's accelerators into isolated groups with restricted communication between them, so that no group can join a larger prohibited workload.
- Cryptographic commitment
- A way to fix a value now without revealing it, so that it can later be opened and shown not to have changed.
- Evidence binding
- Tying verification evidence to the specific device, workload, data and time it describes, so it cannot be substituted, replayed or misattributed.
- FLOP accounting
- Estimating or verifying how many floating-point operations a training run or other workload used, often to compare against a threshold in a rule.
- Hardware-enabled mechanism (HEM)
- A governance or verification function built into AI chips or closely attached hardware, such as usage reporting, location attestation or enforced limits.
- Inference and training workloads
- Training updates a model's weights from data; inference runs fixed weights to produce outputs, and their different resource use underpins several verification methods.
- Interconnect bandwidth
- The data rate of links between accelerators or groups of them; large-scale training needs far more of it than inference, so limiting it constrains workloads.
- Network tap
- A device that copies the traffic on a network link for inspection without disrupting it; proposed for checking what AI data centres compute.
- Numerical nondeterminism
- Differences between runs, or between machines, in the results of the same AI computation, because floating-point rounding depends on the order of operations.
- Positive and negative claims
- A positive claim asserts that something is present or happened; a negative claim, that an activity or resource is absent; a mixed claim, both.
- Proof of (useful) work
- Evidence that a party spent a given amount of computation; in useful variants, the same work also solves a problem someone wants solved.
- Proof of space
- A protocol in which a prover shows that it is dedicating a given amount of storage or memory, rather than computation, to a task.
- Prover
- The party that makes a claim about its own AI hardware, models or workloads and supplies the evidence a verifier checks.
- Recomputation
- Checking a claimed computation by re-running all of it, or a random sample, on hardware the verifier trusts and comparing the results.
- Remote attestation
- A process in which a device sends signed evidence about its state, such as software measurements, so a remote party can judge its trustworthiness.
- Root of trust
- A component that anchors security functions such as measurement, storage and reporting, and must be trusted because its misbehaviour cannot be detected.
- Sampling and assurance
- Checking a random sample of accelerators, workload segments or outputs rather than all of them, so that violations are caught with a calculable probability.
- Side channel
- An unintended path by which information leaks from a system through effects of its operation, such as timing, power draw or electromagnetic emissions.
- Tamper evidence and tamper resistance
- Tamper evidence makes interference detectable; tamper resistance makes it difficult or costly; tamper response reacts to it, often by erasing secrets.
- Threat model
- An explicit statement of who might attack a system, what they can do, and which threats the design covers or leaves out of scope.
- Trusted execution environment (TEE)
- An execution area protected by the processor that keeps the data inside confidential and unaltered, and the code unaltered, even from the host's own software.
- Undeclared compute
- AI-relevant hardware, or uses of declared hardware, that a prover has not reported, and that verification must therefore detect or rule out.
- Verifier
- The party that examines evidence supplied by, or collected about, a prover and decides whether the prover's claim holds.
- Weight exfiltration
- Unauthorized copying of a model's trained parameters out of the environment meant to contain them, by theft or through covert channels.
- Zero-knowledge proof
- A cryptographic protocol by which a prover convinces a verifier that a statement is true while revealing nothing beyond the fact that it is true.