vocabulary.md

Vocabulary

• client - a device or identifyable through an unique id, needs to have following secrets, may or may not be known to others.
• group - a set of clients, clearly identifyable through an unique id.
• member - a client that is currently part of the group.
• known-client - a client that is or has-been part of the group.
• shard - a part (or the whole) of the group secret that is known to the client.
• feed - a append-only log (aka. hypercore)
• entry - a single entry of many a feed feed
• request - an entry to the feed that is not-yet signed.
• write - an special kind of entry contains the request and all the known signatures for the request, it is also additionally signed by the member that initiated the write
• confirm-receipt - a special kind of entry that verifies that a member received it's new shard.
• group-sign-key - a secret that allows to write to the group feed. the group-sign-key is turned into shards using Shamirs Secrets
• group-feed - a feed of writes, contains all the writes that were signed, its the same for all clients - the source of truth.
• client-feed - a feed of requests, contains all the requests, one per known-client and it also contains writes and confirm-receipt.
• ephemeral - data that is not persisted but may be communicated between the known peers.
• outbox - a set of ephemeral data that contains shards used to restore a group-sign-key or new shards to be stored by each of the members.
• requestee - the member that initially created the request.
• state - exposed information of the client through the API. The state exposes information about the client-state and request-state
  • client-state - state of a client as seen by another clients permission
    • sole-owner - client-state of a client when the group has only one client. the client can freely change other operations.
    • pending-add - client-state of a client that has been requested to be added to the group but hasn't finally been added.
    • confirming-add - client-state of a client that has been confirmed to be added to the group but hasn't received the good news yet!
    • pending-remove - client-state of a client that was requested to be removed from the group.
    • removed - client-state of a client that was successfully removed.
    • member - client-state of a client that has been added to the group successfully.
  • request-state - state of a request by a member
    • pending - initial state of the request
    • aborted - aborted by the writer prior to writing it to the group-feed
    • processed - request has been added to the group-feed
• sync - event when the latest known information of all clients has been exchanged with each other.