Proposal Explorer

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Built for an adversarial prover

Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

Published attempts to break a system, including those that found failures. Testing history does not show that open flaws are resolved.

Family findings

• Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

  Context for AI 2040 inference-only verification stack. These findings concern the family or other implementations; applicability must be checked against their stated scope.

  • Supply-chain implants may evade inspection in Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

    Cankaya identifies malicious hardware embedded deep in purchased components as a residual risk that visual inspection and disassembly may not catch. He notes that radiographic examination under high-security standards could mitigate it. ⁸

    Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

  • Openings for airflow, power and optics weaken shielding in Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

    Cankaya notes that keeping attenuation high while passing high-power airflow, cabling and optical links adds complexity beyond existing shielded-enclosure specifications. ⁸

    Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

  • Inspection assumptions may not hold in Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

    The design's statistical argument assumes that visual or disassembly inspection catches every flaw that is present in a sampled unit. Cankaya is unsure whether destructive teardowns are defence-dominant or offence-dominant. ⁸

    Open question · Significant · Open. On the record

Open significant flaws

3 flaws in 1 mechanism

• The recomputation server must be trusted in AI 2040 inference-only verification stack

  The plan calls the integrity of the recomputation server an extremely important aspect, and its argument that sampling verifies all outputs assumes that the server's computations and outputs can be trusted. The companion page notes that the server sits inside the prover's facility, possibly under the prover's physical control, and that hardening it against integrity attacks needs significant research. Amodo rates recomputation-server security as not on track. ^{1 2 4}

  Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• Spare compute is not verified in AI 2040 inference-only verification stack

  The plan states that it does not verify that spare compute is unused for unapproved workloads, because this seems very challenging. It relies instead on side-channel bounds and memory wipes, so that the only results that persist are verified inference outputs. ¹

  Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• A recomputation family degrades against prompt-controlling adversaries in AI 2040 inference-only verification stack

  The plan's companion page names DiFR among the recomputation schemes being tested. An independent study found that Gumbel-based inference verification, the family that includes Token-DiFR, leaks roughly twice as many bits per token when the adversary chooses prompts that disrupt the text's structure, across six models of 1 to 32 billion parameters. The slowdown it imposes on a hidden-signalling adversary falls from 146–254 times under benign prompts to 60–118 times. The attack weakens the bound on hidden information in outputs, which the plan relies on to keep undeclared results from leaving. ^{1 2 6 7}

  Demonstrated attack · Significant · Open. On the record

Not yet demonstrated

R1 Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

Mechanisms on the map that are not in the proposal. Pointers, not recommendations. ?

• R2 Tamper evidence for verifier devices Add
  • Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it. Checking that taps are correctly installed and stay in place at scale is not a solved problem, and hardening the recomputation server inside the prover's facility needs significant research.
• R1 Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure Add
  • Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it. Memory wiping may use existing algorithms, but hardware testing is at an early stage.
• R1 Network taps and certifiers Add
  • Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it. Passive optical taps work at 400G, but the 800G and 1600G line rates now arriving in data centres are undemonstrated.
• R1 Whole-workload recomputation (reproducible packets) Add
  • Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it. A fully reproducible inference stack needs substantial software and tooling, and per-packet network reproducibility may need considerable software, firmware and possibly hardware work.
• R3 Sampled inference recomputation Add
  • Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities depends on it.

Missing prerequisites

• R3 Sampled inference recomputation needed by Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities Add
• R1 Whole-workload recomputation (reproducible packets) needed by Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities Add

Blockers

6 blockers recorded

• Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities
  • A fully reproducible inference stack needs substantial software and tooling, and per-packet network reproducibility may need considerable software, firmware and possibly hardware work. Performance & compatibility. Waits on Whole-workload recomputation (reproducible packets) ²
  • Passive optical taps work at 400G, but the 800G and 1600G line rates now arriving in data centres are undemonstrated. Performance & compatibility. Waits on Network taps and certifiers ²
  • Checking that taps are correctly installed and stay in place at scale is not a solved problem, and hardening the recomputation server inside the prover's facility needs significant research. Hardware trust. Waits on Tamper evidence for verifier devices ^{2 4}
  • There is no plan yet for quickly scaling side-channel defences on a frontier cluster; only early theoretical pieces exist. Coverage & hidden compute. Waits on Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities ²
  • Memory wiping may use existing algorithms, but hardware testing is at an early stage. Coverage & hidden compute. Waits on Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure ²
  • Robust red-teaming of recomputation schemes has not started, and most algorithm development remains academic. Adversarial validation ^{2 4}

From the family or selected implementation's record. ?

Model weights

Unspecified for Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities. Check the implementation record.

Inputs and outputs

Unspecified for Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities. Check the implementation record.

Training data

Unspecified for Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities. Check the implementation record.

Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

• R1 AI 2040 inference-only verification stack Proposed architecture, AI Futures Project
• R1 Low-trust AI compute verification system overview Proposed architecture, Machine Intelligence Research Institute
• R1 RAND secure inference data center (SIDC) design Proposed architecture, RAND

1. Verification Plan, R. Dean (2026). Original
2. Get Involved in Verification, AI Futures Project (2026). Original
3. Verifying international AI deals: Plan A, the state-of-play, and what you can do to help, T. Milton et al. (2026). Original
4. AI 2040 Plan A — Verification SITREP, Amodo Design (2026). Original
5. Fitting a Network TAP to our Inference Verification Prototype, Amodo Design (2026). Original
6. Verifying LLM Inference to Detect Model Weight Exfiltration, R. Rinberg et al. (2025). Original
7. Adversarial Entropy Inflation Against Gumbel-Based Inference Verification, N. Kezins (2026). Original
8. Suppressing Side Channels in an Untrusted Data Center via Retrofitted Defenses, N. Cankaya (2026). Original