Glossary

The words a security review turns on

The Enclessa glossary defines the terms that decide a collaboration platform purchase, in one sentence each and then in full. It covers encryption concepts including MLS per RFC 9420, forward secrecy and post-compromise security; platform concepts including tenant isolation, room modes and selective forwarding units; and compliance concepts including the GDPR, data processing agreements, subprocessors, retention and legal hold. Each entry states how Enclessa uses the term, including the several it deliberately does not.

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At a glance

Entries: 28 terms, each with its own page
Scope: Encryption, platform, compliance, operations, commercial
Standards named: RFC 9420, RFC 7643, RFC 7644, Regulation (EU) 2016/679
Terms Enclessa does not have: Single sign-on, SCIM, compliance export
Phrase Enclessa refuses: Zero-knowledge — see the entry for why
Spelling: British, and the German terms kept in German

A

Operations

Audit log

An audit log is an append-only record of who did what, to which object, and when — kept separately from application logs so that it can be relied on as evidence rather than read as debugging output.

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C

Compliance

Compliance export

A compliance export is a bulk extraction of message and file records in a structured format that a supervision, archiving or e-discovery system can ingest, rather than one a person is expected to read.

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Encryption

Cross-signing

Cross-signing is a scheme in which each person holds one identity key that signs certificates for their own devices, so that verifying a person once is enough to trust every device they own rather than verifying each device separately.

Read the entry

D

Compliance

Data processing agreement (DPA)

A data processing agreement is the contract required by Article 28 of the GDPR between a controller and a processor, setting out what the processor may do with personal data, on whose instructions, with what security, and what happens at the end.

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Compliance

Data residency

Data residency is the requirement that data be stored and processed within a named geographic territory, usually a country or an economic area such as the European Union.

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Compliance

Data subject access request (DSAR)

A data subject access request is a demand by an individual, under Article 15 of the GDPR, to be told whether their personal data is being processed and to receive a copy of it together with information about how and why it is used.

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Compliance

DSGVO

DSGVO is the German name for the GDPR — Datenschutz-Grundverordnung — and refers to exactly the same Regulation (EU) 2016/679, not to a separate German law.

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E

Encryption

End-to-end encryption

End-to-end encryption is a design in which a message is encrypted on the sending device and decrypted only on the receiving devices, so that the server carrying it holds no key that can open it.

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F

Encryption

Forward secrecy

Forward secrecy is the property that compromising a key today does not allow the messages sent before that compromise to be decrypted, because the keys that protected them have already been destroyed.

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G

Compliance

GDPR

The GDPR is Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the European Union law that governs the processing of personal data and applies to any organisation processing the data of people in the EU, wherever that organisation is established.

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L

Compliance

Legal hold

A legal hold is an instruction that suspends the normal deletion of specified data because it may be relevant to litigation, an investigation or a regulatory request.

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Platform

LiveKit

LiveKit is an open-source WebRTC media server, licensed under Apache 2.0, that provides selective forwarding, room management, access tokens and recording for real-time audio and video applications.

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M

Platform

Managed channel

A managed channel is a room whose contents the server can read, which is what allows server-side search, retention rules, audit trails and organisation-wide export to operate on it.

Read the entry

Encryption

MLS (RFC 9420)

MLS, or Messaging Layer Security, is the IETF standard published as RFC 9420 for end-to-end encrypted group messaging, designed so that adding or removing a member costs work proportional to the logarithm of the group size rather than to the group size itself.

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Platform

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which one running installation of an application serves many independent customer organisations, each of which sees only its own data.

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O

Encryption

OpenMLS

OpenMLS is an open-source implementation of the MLS protocol written in Rust, developed in the open by contributors from Phoenix R&D, Wire and Cryspen, and subjected to external security review.

Read the entry

P

Encryption

Post-compromise security

Post-compromise security is the property that a conversation heals after a device is compromised, so that once the compromised device is removed and the group re-keys, the attacker who held its keys can no longer read new messages.

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R

Compliance

Retention policy

A retention policy is a rule stating how long a category of data is kept before it is deleted, applied automatically rather than left to somebody remembering.

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Platform

Room mode

A room mode is the fixed property of a conversation that decides whether the server can read its contents, chosen when the room is created and never changed afterwards.

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S

Encryption

Safety numbers

A safety number is a short string derived from the public keys of both sides of an encrypted conversation, which the two people compare through a separate channel to confirm that no third party has interposed itself.

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Operations

SCIM

SCIM is an open standard, published as RFC 7643 and RFC 7644, that lets an identity provider create, update and deactivate user accounts in another application automatically over a REST API.

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Commercial

Seat-based pricing

Seat-based pricing charges a fixed amount for each person who can use a product, so the bill is the seat price multiplied by the number of people rather than by how much they use it.

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Platform

SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit)

A selective forwarding unit is a media server that receives one stream from each participant in a call and forwards copies to the others, without decoding or mixing them.

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Operations

Single sign-on (SSO)

Single sign-on is an arrangement in which one identity provider authenticates a person once and then vouches for them to other applications, so that each application never handles their password.

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Compliance

Subprocessor

A subprocessor is a third party that a processor engages to carry out part of the processing of personal data on the controller’s behalf — a hosting provider, a payment provider or an email relay, for example.

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T

Platform

Tenant isolation

Tenant isolation is the guarantee that no request made by one customer organisation can read or change any data belonging to another, enforced by the system rather than by convention.

Read the entry

W

Platform

WebRTC

WebRTC is the browser standard for real-time audio, video and data connections, which lets a web page carry a call without a plugin and encrypts every media stream by default.

Read the entry

Z

Encryption

Zero-knowledge

Zero-knowledge is a term from cryptography for a proof that convinces a verifier a statement is true while revealing nothing else, and it is also used loosely in marketing to mean that a provider cannot read customer data — two things that are not related.

Read the entry

Where these terms are applied

A definition is only useful next to the thing it describes. The security page covers how the data is actually protected, the trust centre covers the paperwork a legal team asks for, and the encryption feature page covers what MLS does inside the product.

Questions

About this glossary

Why does Enclessa publish a glossary?

Because the terms in an encrypted collaboration purchase are used inconsistently across the market, and a buyer comparing two vendors is often comparing two different meanings of the same word. Defining them in public makes Enclessa easier to check rather than easier to sell.

Does every glossary entry describe something Enclessa has?

No. Several entries — single sign-on, SCIM, compliance export and platform-wide legal hold — define a capability Enclessa does not have today, and each says so in its own entry rather than leaving the definition to imply otherwise.

Is Enclessa zero-knowledge?

No, and Enclessa avoids the phrase. Direct messages and group direct messages are end-to-end encrypted with MLS and the server holds no key for them; channels are managed rooms the server can read so that search, retention and export work; and metadata, account data and billing data are visible to Enclessa in every case.

What is the difference between GDPR and DSGVO?

None. DSGVO is the German name for the GDPR — Datenschutz-Grundverordnung — and refers to the identical Regulation (EU) 2016/679. What is genuinely separate is the German Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, which fills in the areas the regulation leaves to member states.

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