Proposal Explorer

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Built for an adversarial prover

Chip location verification

No new hardware needed

Chip location verification

Not counted

Excluded by your filters: Model identity attestation

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

• Chip location verification: Analysis
• Model identity attestation: Independent red-team · excluded by filters

Excluded by your filters

• Model identity attestation Assumes a semi-trusted prover; the filter asks for a prover classified as adversarial.

Open critical flaws

• Underlying attestation can be forged or relayed in Model identity attestation

  Critical for the enclave route against an operator with physical access to affected hardware, or control of an unpatched SEV-SNP hypervisor. It does not apply to the recomputation route. PAL*M excludes physical attacks, and Tinfoil acknowledges this boundary.

  The enclave route inherits the platform-specific TEE attestation failures. Intel TDX forgery and H100 relay were demonstrated with physical access and host control. Battering RAM defeated AMD SEV-SNP attestation on DDR4 servers; RMPocalypse did so from malicious host software on platforms without AMD's fixes. These demonstrate failures of the trust roots, not of each model-commitment protocol. ^{9 11 15 17 18 19}

  Response: The TEE.fail authors report that physical interposer attacks are outside Intel's and AMD's threat models. AMD reports fixes for RMPocalypse.

  Demonstrated attack · Critical · Open · Inherited finding. On the record · Related finding in TEE remote attestation for AI workloads

  Related mechanism R1 Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors: A tamper-protected enclosure around the chip is the proposed answer when the party that holds the hardware may attack it physically. A pointer, not evidence that this flaw is mitigated. Add

Open significant flaws

6 flaws in 2 mechanisms

• Extracting a chip's key lets another device answer for it in Chip location verification

  Ping-based protocols rely on cryptographic keys stored on the chip. Tee and Happel argue that an adversary with physical access could extract these keys and so compromise location verification. They propose GPU fingerprints as a mitigation, so far tested on 24 GPUs. Brass and Aarne assume the keys are stored securely, for example in a TPM. ^{1 6}

  Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• Added delay can shift an estimated position in Chip location verification

  Brass and Aarne cite internet-geolocation research in which artificially increased round-trip times moved the estimated location by up to 1,000 km, with a 74% chance of avoiding detection. Avellar and Grunewald list inflated ping times from circuitous routing as an evasion route. Added delay only loosens a distance bound, and Brass and Aarne propose a hard time limit as the counter: a chip that replies too slowly cannot be ruled out of a restricted location. ^{1 4}

  Demonstrated attack · Significant · Open. On the record

• Faster-than-assumed network paths in Chip location verification

  Brass and Aarne list dark fibre and other private high-speed interconnects as ways to lower measured delays artificially. They judge that leasing dark fibre would probably not be a considerable challenge for covertly or openly adversarial actors. Avellar and Grunewald note that this can make a chip appear to be somewhere else entirely. A limit set at the vacuum speed of light cannot be beaten, but it makes honest chips fail more often. ^{1 4}

  Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• Compromised landmarks can falsify measurements in Chip location verification

  A party that controls landmark servers can report false timing. Brass and Aarne cite research in which manipulating a third of the landmarks shifted the estimated location by about 700 km. Avellar and Grunewald note that compromised landmarks let adversaries spoof travel-time measurements directly. The draft specification asks verifiers to require anchors in diverse places, run by several independent operators. ^{1 4 5}

  Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• For private models, a user can confirm consistency but not content in Model identity attestation

  When weights are not published, users can check that the same root hash is served each time, but not what the model is. Pairing the hash with an attested evaluation, as in Attestable Audits, is one proposed remedy. ^{8 21}

  Open question · Significant · Open. On the record

• Recomputation depends on trusted logging and randomness, and its tolerance leaves a covert channel in Model identity attestation

  The recomputation variant assumes that every input, output and seed is logged correctly, and that the attacker can neither predict nor manipulate which messages are sampled for verification. Legitimate nondeterminism concentrates at a few token positions, and slow leaks within the tolerated slack remain possible. An independent study showed that an adversary who controls the prompts roughly doubles the bits leaked per token, reducing the exfiltration slowdown from 146–254 times under benign prompts to 60–118 times. The attack targets the exfiltration bound, not the check that outputs match the declared model. ^{10 16}

  Demonstrated attack · Significant · Open. On the record

  Related mechanism R1 Network taps and certifiers: Taps are proposed to copy and hash traffic on the monitored links, reducing reliance on the prover's own log. This still depends on the monitored boundary and trusted capture. A pointer, not evidence that this flaw is mitigated. Add

  Related mechanism R3 Deterministic and bit-exact inference: Bit-exact inference would remove the numerical tolerance that leaves this channel. A pointer, not evidence that this flaw is mitigated. Add

Not yet demonstrated

R1 Chip location verification

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

• R1 Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors Add
  • Bears on the open critical flaw “Underlying attestation can be forged or relayed” in Model identity attestation. A tamper-protected enclosure around the chip is the proposed answer when the party that holds the hardware may attack it physically.
• R3 Deterministic and bit-exact inference Add
  • Bears on the open significant flaw “Recomputation depends on trusted logging and randomness, and its tolerance leaves a covert channel” in Model identity attestation. Bit-exact inference would remove the numerical tolerance that leaves this channel.
  • Model identity attestation waits on it. Numerical nondeterminism limits how tightly recomputation can pin down the model and sampling.
• R1 Network taps and certifiers Add
  • Bears on the open significant flaw “Recomputation depends on trusted logging and randomness, and its tolerance leaves a covert channel” in Model identity attestation. Taps are proposed to copy and hash traffic on the monitored links, reducing reliance on the prover's own log. This still depends on the monitored boundary and trusted capture.
• R3 TEE remote attestation for AI workloads Add

  Excluded by filters: assumes a semi-trusted prover

  • Model identity attestation waits on it. Attestation that resists physical attackers, for the enclave variant.
  • Chip location verification depends on it.

Missing prerequisites

• R3 TEE remote attestation for AI workloads needed by Chip location verification Add

Shared foundations

• TEE remote attestation for AI workloads relied on by Chip location verification and Model identity attestation

Blockers

7 blockers recorded

• Chip location verification
  • No public code or reproducible end-to-end location results are available for the reported H100 prototype. Adversarial validation ^{2 3}
  • Per-chip keys must be provisioned and protected against extraction; hardware-integrated, tamper-resistant versions still need R&D. Hardware trust ^{1 6 22}
  • The time limit forces a trade-off: a limit at the speed of light in fibre can be beaten by faster links, while one at the vacuum speed of light makes honest chips fail often. Protocol soundness ¹
  • A trusted landmark network must be built and secured, and who should operate it, under what oversight, is unsettled. Access & governance ^{1 4}
• Model identity attestation
  • Attestation that resists physical attackers, for the enclave variant. Hardware trust. Waits on TEE remote attestation for AI workloads ¹⁵
  • Numerical nondeterminism limits how tightly recomputation can pin down the model and sampling. Protocol soundness. Waits on Deterministic and bit-exact inference ¹⁰
  • The recomputation variant needs the verifier to hold the declared weights. Access & governance ¹⁰

From the family or selected implementation's record. ?

Model weights

Depends on the design for Model identity attestation.

Not involved: Chip location verification.

Inputs and outputs

Depends on the design for Model identity attestation.

Not involved: Chip location verification.

Training data

Not involved: Chip location verification and Model identity attestation.

Chip location verification

• R1 Lucid sovereignty (location) certificates Standard, Lucid Computing

Model identity attestation

• R2 Attestable Audits Research prototype, University of Cambridge
• R2 PAL*M Research prototype, University of Waterloo
• R3 Tinfoil model identity (Modelwrap) Product, Tinfoil

1. Location Verification for AI Chips, A. Brass & O. Aarne (2024). Original
2. Location Verification for AI Chips (issue brief), A. Brass (2025). Original
3. Ping-based Location, Ulyssean (2025). Original
4. Near-Term Verification Methods for AI Chip Exports, B. Avellar & E. Grunewald (2026). Original
5. Sovereignty Certificates: draft specification, version 0.1.0, Sovereignty Certificates Working Group (2025). Original
6. GPU Fingerprinting for Location Verification, W. Tee & J. Happel (2026). Original
7. Secure, Governable Chips: Using On-Chip Mechanisms to Manage National Security Risks from AI & Advanced Computing, O. Aarne et al. (2024). Original
8. How Tinfoil Proves Exactly What Model Is Running, Tinfoil Team (2026). Original
9. PAL*M: Property Attestation for Large Generative Models, P. Chantasantitam et al. (2026). Original
10. Verifying LLM Inference to Detect Model Weight Exfiltration, R. Rinberg et al. (2025). Original
11. A primer on secure enclaves, Tinfoil (2026). Original
12. Backend infrastructure, Tinfoil (2026). Original
13. How verification works in Tinfoil, Tinfoil (2026). Original
14. modelwrap: Reproducible dm-verity read-only image of Huggingface models, Tinfoil (2026). Original
15. TEE.fail: Breaking Trusted Execution Environments via DDR5 Memory Bus Interposition, J. Chuang et al. (2026). Original
16. Adversarial Entropy Inflation Against Gumbel-Based Inference Verification, N. Kezins (2026). Original
17. Battering RAM: Low-Cost Interposer Attacks on Confidential Computing via Dynamic Memory Aliasing, J. De Meulemeester et al. (2026). Original
18. RMPocalypse: How a Catch-22 Breaks AMD SEV-SNP, B. Schlüter & S. Shinde (2025). Original
19. SEV-SNP RMP Initialization Vulnerability (AMD-SB-3020), AMD (2025). Original
20. On TEEs for Privacy-Preserving Monitoring in AI Governance, Gloria Z (2026). Original
21. Attestable Audits: Verifiable AI Safety Benchmarks Using Trusted Execution Environments, C. Schnabl et al. (2025). Original
22. Hardware-Level Governance of AI Compute: A Feasibility Taxonomy for Regulatory Compliance and Treaty Verification, S. Ansari (2026). Original