// GLOSSARY

Deployment Pipeline

The path of taking the model from the registry to the deployment environment; it covers recording in a verifiable way the trust chain of staging-versus-production, multi-tenant, multi-region or shared-platform topology. It is the last link of the model trust chain, and this position makes it especially critical. All the earlier links of a model's supply chain, the training data, the build pipeline, the approval in the registry, may have been carefully secured; provenance may be proven, attestation signed, the SLSA level high. But all this trust is tested once more as the model is taken to production. If the deployment pipeline is insecure, even the best-validated model can be altered at the moment of deployment, that is, at the point where trust is most relaxed; the attacker targets not the head of the chain but precisely its end. So the assessment asks these questions: is the artefact validated in staging the same as the one going to production, who can intervene in the deployment process, can one customer's deployment affect another on a multi-tenant platform, and is integrity preserved in a rollback. The trust produced with provenance and attestation carries meaning only if it is preserved in this final step too.