Glossary
The words used on these pages, in plain language.
Sign-in and identity
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Issuer | The service that authenticates the person and signs the tokens. Its name is the issuer of the discovery document. |
| Subject (sub) | The person's identifier for your application specifically. Pairwise: different applications get different values for the same human. |
| Audience | Who a token was minted for. A token for someone else must be refused. |
| State | A random value tying the callback back to the browser session that started sign-in. |
| Nonce | A random value echoed inside the ID token, so a substituted or replayed response is detectable. |
| PKCE | A one-time secret proving the code is being exchanged by whoever requested it. S256 only. |
| JWKS | The issuer's published signing keys, used to verify ID tokens. |
| Claim | One piece of verified information, such as legal_name or age_over_18. |
| Scope | The name you ask for a claim by. The catalogue is the list of scopes that exist. |
| Assurance level | How strongly the current evidence supports the person's identity, as identity_assurance_level. |
| Userinfo | The endpoint returning the claims the consent in force allows, as a flat map. |
| Test identity | A synthetic person a sandbox application's team signs in as. |
| Tester | A real person invited to try a sandbox application with their own identity. |
Consent and access
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Consent record | The durable, versioned record of what a person approved for one application. The current authority — not the token you were issued. |
| Ceiling | allowedClaimScopes on the application: what it may ever request. |
| Grant | What one person approved on one consent screen. |
| Document policy | The markers in allowedDataCategories without which no identity document is ever released. |
| Disclosure | A recorded release of a person's data to your application. Every userinfo read is one. |
| Revocation | A person disconnecting your application. Whole-consent, never per claim; it stops future reads and cannot recall copies you hold. |
| Publisher | The business or individual an application goes out under, named on the consent screen, verified by staff. |
Applications
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Project | The pair of records — one sandbox, one production — that make up one application. |
| Sandbox | The record you build against. Signs in its team, its test identities and its testers. Not a free tier. |
| Production | The record real people sign in to, once reviewed and switched on. |
| Go-live checklist | The 9 checks computed from live records that decide whether you may ask for review. |
| Release | The next version of a live application's configuration, prepared beside what is serving and switched to by you. |
| Live change | A narrowing change to a live application that applies at once without a release. |
| Step-up | Asking you to confirm with a passkey before a sensitive action. A recovery path, not a denial. |
| Credits | What a production application's sign-ins are paid with: one credit is one US cent, drawn from the application owner's balance. They are added in the developer console, under Usage & billing, by the owner or by a team member with the billing role on one of the owner's active production applications, who adds them to the owner's balance. Whoever pays gets the receipt, in their name, listed with their purchases. Budgets are set by the owner alone. Sandbox uses no paid credits. |
Reliability and refusal
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Fail closed | Refusing when a required check cannot be completed, rather than proceeding. |
| Replay | Presenting a code, a callback or a webhook delivery a second time. Every single-use value is consumed atomically to defeat it. |
| Idempotency | Handling a repeated delivery or retry so it is applied once. For webhooks, deduplicate on the event id. |
| Request id | The requestId in every error envelope: what support needs to find the request without you sending anything sensitive. |
Trust
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Checkpoint | A signed 256-byte statement committing to the heads of every sealed stream, produced once an hour when there is something to seal. |
| Stream | One of the five append-only Merkle trees: audit, access, disclosure, receipts, transparency. |
| Proof bundle | The file a person downloads about one record, with the inclusion proof from its salted leaf to a signed checkpoint. |
| Anchoring | Writing a checkpoint to a chain so a stranger holds a copy: UnifyID's contract on Base as the authority, Sign Protocol as a second witness. Built and tested; it starts on Base mainnet at launch and is not switched on today. |
What this does not do
- Terms that are not here are not on the platform. Verifiable credentials, wallets, claim access after the session, entitlements and agent authority all belonged to features that were removed or never shipped, and the words left with them.
Verified against API commit 234dba22 on 2026-10-18. The routes, scopes, checklist, events and limits on these pages are read from that export, not typed.