Core concepts & glossary
The words below are used consistently across SafeHanded and this documentation.
People and places
Section titled “People and places”Organisation (org) : The paying tenant — an MSP, a company IT department, or a shop. Owns users, policy, billing and integrations.
Client : For MSPs, an end-customer company under the org, with its own branding, contacts, domain and directory connection. Single-company orgs have one implicit client and never see the concept.
Member : A person’s membership in an org, with a role: Owner, Admin, Technician or Auditor. See Roles & permissions.
Team : A named group of members (e.g. “Service Desk”) that can be chosen as recipients on a request.
Subject : The end user whose credential is being requested, identified by email/UPN and display name. They have no account and interact only through a link.
The handoff
Section titled “The handoff”Request : One credential handoff: a subject, a template, a justification, a ticket, a time-to-live, recipients and a lifecycle status.
Handoff link : The single-use URL the subject opens. It carries a high-entropy token and, in the URL fragment, a commitment to the recipients — the fragment never reaches the server.
Challenge code : An optional 6-digit code the technician reads to the subject out of band, required to unlock the form. A leaked link alone can’t satisfy it.
Template : Defines which fields are collected — e.g. Username and password, Windows password, Email account, BitLocker recovery key, or Custom (a single field you name on the request, such as “Door code”). New organisations start on Custom; an Owner or Admin can make another template the default under Settings → Field templates, and Preview shows the page your user will see.
Preset : A saved set of request options (justification, expiry, verification, recipients, delivery) an admin prepares so a request — including one triggered from a ticket — can be created in one action.
Send a secret : An outbound share — the technician sends a credential, note or file to someone as a one-time link, rather than requesting one. See Send a secret.
Keys and reveals
Section titled “Keys and reveals”Envelope : The encrypted payload — the ciphertext plus the content key sealed once per recipient.
Identity key : A member’s personal key pair. Requests are encrypted to identity keys, not to devices, so a new laptop doesn’t strand anything.
Unlock method : A way to open your identity private key on a browser: a passkey (WebAuthn PRF), your 24-word recovery phrase, or a cached copy on an enrolled device.
Organisation recovery key : An optional org-level key pair. When enabled, every envelope is also sealed to it, so an Owner can recover a credential in a break-glass ceremony. See Organisation recovery.
Reveal : Decrypting a submitted credential in the technician’s browser after a passkey step-up.
Complete / purge : Ending a request — the envelope is deleted and the status becomes completed. Triggered manually, by time-to-live, or by the linked ticket closing.
Ticketing
Section titled “Ticketing”Ticket link : The association between a request and a ticket in a connected system, including the ticket’s last known status.
Ticketing adapter : A connector for one ticketing system. Each adapter declares the capabilities it supports — ticket search, notes, company import, status polling. See the capability matrix.