This glossary defines canonical Authling terminology. Do not copy Chatto terms here unless Authling uses the same word with an explicitly defined meaning.
Authling — An independent, self-hostable identity provider and light user-controlled metadata service. Authling may be trusted by Chatto servers but is not itself a Chatto server or a user's home server.
Account — Authling's opaque aggregate for one user identity. Its account ID
is the stable OpenID Connect subject (sub) exposed to authorized clients. A local
account may have an encrypted, verified email/password credential and one or
more independent browser sessions. Accounts do not yet have profile data or
OIDC grants.
Local credential — An Authling login method based on a verified normalized email address and an Argon2id password verifier. Both values are retained only inside an encrypted credential payload.
Signup flow — Short-lived, encrypted runtime state that carries an email verification challenge to account creation. It is not an account and expires after 15 minutes.
Browser session — Short-lived, server-side runtime state that binds an opaque browser cookie to one account after signup or login. A session is not a durable account fact and can be revoked independently from other sessions.
Issuer — The immutable public URL identifying one Authling deployment as one OpenID Provider. Tokens and discovery use this exact value; changing it is an identity migration, not an ordinary listener reconfiguration.
Relying party — An application that asks Authling to authenticate an account through OpenID Connect. Its individual protocol identity is an OIDC client.
Client ID Metadata Document (CIMD) — An HTTPS JSON document whose URL is also a public OIDC client's identifier. Authling uses CIMD for automatic, read-only client onboarding without a dynamic registration write API.
Account data space — One small, global, account-owned TinyBase data set that
user devices synchronize through Authling. It is independent of Chatto servers
and does not yet contain application namespaces. An OIDC client can receive
read and write access through explicit consent for the account_data scope.
TinyBase peer — One participant in TinyBase synchronization. Authling is
the durable, always-online peer; each user device is another peer with its own
local MergeableStore.
Cryptographic erasure — Making encrypted Authling data permanently unreadable by irreversibly destroying the key material required to decrypt it. Authling uses this to erase data from immutable event history without rewriting that history.
Data key — A random, purpose- and epoch-scoped encryption key used to encrypt sensitive account, credential, or application data. Data keys are wrapped by a user key and referenced opaquely from durable events.
User key — An account-scoped, KMS-managed wrapping key. Destroying a user key makes all data keys wrapped by it unusable and provides Authling's account-wide cryptographic-erasure boundary.