Glossary
The words this site uses in a precise sense, in one place. Where a term is also used loosely elsewhere in the industry, the entry says what it does not mean here.
The documents
A signed statement by a professional about a credential they hold: trade, jurisdiction, licence reference, legal name, and a validity window. It proves that a key said something. It does not prove the licence. RVW-1.
A signed statement by somebody else that they checked something and this is what they saw. It carries exactly the weight of whoever signed it and no more. RVW-4.
A list of current licences published by the issuing authority on its own domain, ideally signed. The one thing this lab asks an authority for. RVW-5.
A signed withdrawal by the subject of one of its own claims. Only the subject and the issuing authority can withdraw a claim. RVW-6.
A statement by a cold identity key authorising a separate operational address for a single job, so a fresh address per transaction is not punished. RVW-3.
The mechanics
The one byte sequence a document reduces to before hashing: object keys sorted by Unicode code point, recursively, no whitespace outside strings, UTF-8, no floating point numbers. Two implementations that disagree here will disagree about everything downstream.
The SHA-256 of the canonical bytes, lowercase hex. It is the name of the document. Change one byte and it is a different document with a different name.
Publishing the subject key in DNS on the domain the business already uses, and naming that domain inside the claim. A lookalike domain cannot produce the pair. RVW-2.
An optional onchain record that a publisher committed to the state of its log on a given day. It buys a timestamp nobody can move. It holds no credential and no personal data. RVW-7.
Any software or person deciding whether to rely on a claim. The protocol never decides for them: it hands them what was seen and when.
The two scales
Level describes a claim. L0 to L3, by how much evidence has been layered on top of it: signed by the subject, bound to a domain, attested by checkers, covered by an authority file. A level is a property of one document at one moment. The levels page sets out what each one does and does not prove.
Grade describes a register. A to E, by what the authority publishes. A grade says nothing about the quality of the supervision behind the register: an authority can run an excellent register and still grade D because it is a search form. The index carries all 54 of them.
The two are independent. A professional in a grade E jurisdiction can still reach level 1 on their own, which is the whole reason the protocol starts at zero cooperation.
Words this site avoids
- Verified
Nothing here outputs it. A consumer is given the level reached and the age of the evidence, and makes its own decision. A single word hides both.
- Trusted
There is no trust list. Revow does not decide whose attestations count, because deciding that would make it the authority it is trying to route around.
- Identity
The protocol binds a licence to a key. It does not establish who a human being is, and nothing in it should be read as doing so.
- Badge
A badge is a picture that survives its own revocation. Every display rule here exists to prevent one.