Trust Ledger
A tamper-evident, hash-chained record of every governed run, action, and approval.
category ▸ Data & Provenance
Trust Ledger, in plain language.
A trust ledger is an append-only audit record designed so that any alteration is detectable. Every consequential event — an agent run, an action execution, an approval decision — is sealed into the chain, and because each record cryptographically depends on the one before it, you cannot quietly insert, edit, delete, or reorder history.
This turns audit logging from a mutable convenience into provable evidence. A normal log can be edited by anyone with database access; a hash-chained ledger lets you prove, mathematically, that the records you are showing an auditor are the records that were written.
How Cortex implements it.
This term isn't abstract here — it maps to a real capability in the runtime. Here is exactly how Cortex enforces or relates to it.
Cortex's Trust Ledger hash-chains every audit event with a monotonic sequence per tenant, and a verifyChain endpoint recomputes the chain to return ok:true or the exact sequence where it broke. Each governed outcome also emits a signed receipt a third party can verify offline.
It is honest by construction: sealing begins at a go-forward genesis rather than retro-faking history, and the lineage graph and datapoint provenance hang off the same ledger — so the trace you read is the run that actually happened.
Keep building the vocabulary.
These terms sit next to this one in the governed-AI model — follow the thread to see how the controls connect.
Hash chain
A sequence of records where each one cryptographically includes the hash of the previous.
Tamper-evident
A record whose integrity can be proven — any change to it is detectable after the fact.
Provenance
The recorded origin of a fact or output — what source it came from, and where.
Governed runtime
The execution layer where every agent action passes a policy gate before it can run.
See Trust Ledger enforced, not just defined.
Book a walkthrough and watch the controls in this glossary return real verdicts, seal real evidence, and trace every fact back to its source.