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.
Join the waitlist and watch the controls in this glossary return real verdicts, seal real evidence, and trace every fact back to its source.