---
title: "The Blind Machine glossary"
description: "Definitions for the privacy, governance, application, and verification terms used by The Blind Machine."
last_updated: 2026-07-25
canonical: "https://blindmachine.org/glossary"
---

# The Blind Machine glossary

These definitions describe the product's actual privacy, governance, application,
and verification boundaries.

## Aggregate-only

A release rule that permits a computation to return a cohort-level result, not an individual contribution.

## Application

A signed, content-addressed computation bundle that defines accepted inputs, the compute stage, governance limits, and the permitted result.

## Ciphertext

Encrypted data produced locally by the blind CLI. It is the only representation of a private contribution that the hosted service accepts.

## Cohort commitment

A digest binding the frozen set of contributions used by a computation. It lets a verifier detect a changed cohort.

## Computation Certificate

A public record binding the application, cohort commitment, inputs, result digest, and governance facts for one completed computation.

## Content address

A SHA-256 digest used as an artifact identity. If bytes change, the identity changes.

## Contribution

One participant's locally encrypted input uploaded to a governed project. Raw and encoded source data are not contributions to the server.

## Freeze

The irreversible project transition that fixes the cohort before computation, limiting add-remove differencing attacks.

## Minimum N

The minimum number of accepted contributions required before an application may run for a frozen project.

## Private context

Secret key material and other local-only cryptographic state. It must never be uploaded to the hosted service or pasted into an agent prompt.

## Public context

Shareable cryptographic parameters and public key material that enable computation on ciphertext without granting decryption capability.

## Signed bundle

An application archive whose payload digest is covered by an Ed25519 signature and verified before installation or publication.

## Trust class

A label the CLI uses at a boundary: LOCAL ONLY, UPLOADABLE, SHAREABLE, verified, or mismatch.