Proposal Explorer

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Chip location verification and Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

No new hardware needed

Chip location verification and On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

Attack testing records published testing for this use. It does not by itself show independent review, a formal proof or that a deployed system is secure.

• Chip location verification: Analysis
• Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization: Analysis
• On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters: Red-teamed

Open significant failures

8 failures in 3 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}

  Known failure · 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}

  Known failure · 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}

  Known failure · 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}

  Known failure · Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• Operator control of pod routing collapses the bound in Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

  Lucid's analysis finds that if the operator can freely assign pods to routers, it could dedicate a whole cell of 100 or more pods to one pipeline stage. The bound then falls to about 90–220x uncompressed and as low as about 25x with compression. The proposed mitigation, auditor-controlled random assignment that is periodically re-randomized, has not been implemented. ⁹

  Known failure · Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• Parallel scale-up switches are hard enforcement points in Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

  In GB200 topologies, GPUs reach GPUs in other nodes through NVSwitches without a NIC on the path. Amodo notes that limits are hard to enforce there because many switches work in parallel, so compromising one or two would bypass the limit. ¹²

  Known failure · Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

• Adversarially disguised fine-tuning partly evades classification in On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

  Across 20 evasion strategy families in five monitor-evader rounds, the classifier's accuracy against the most challenging disguised workloads held out from training was 43–87%. White-box LoRA fine-tuning was the only evasion family detected less than half the time. The evaluation covered single nodes, PyTorch-level evasion and NVIDIA hardware. ¹⁷

  Known failure · Demonstrated attack · Significant · Open. On the record

• Counters leak information about protected workloads in On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

  Performance counters have been used as a side channel against TEEs, for example in CounterSEVeillance. NVIDIA disables performance counters in full confidential-computing mode, stating that they could provide an avenue for side-channel attacks. Richer counters for verification therefore pull against confidentiality. ^{18 19}

  Known failure · Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

Scope limitations

• Undeclared local storage raises per-pod capacity in Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

  More memory or storage per pod helps an adversary. Lucid requires per-pod storage to be declared, capped and physically inspected. ⁹

  Scope limitation · Theoretical argument. On the record

• Training within one pod is not covered in Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

  Lucid's bounds concern pre-training models larger than the pods are sized for. Training models that fit in one pod, fine-tuning and reinforcement-learning post-training within one pod are outside the modelled threat. ⁹

  Scope limitation · Open question. On the record

• Software-read telemetry can be forged by the operator in On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

  NVML-based classification assumes trustworthy telemetry. Without a tamper-resistant read path, an authenticated telemetry channel and secure boot of the monitoring software, an operator who controls the full software stack could forge counter values. Monfared et al. start from the same premise: current GPUs expose little trusted telemetry and can be modified or virtualized. ^{15 17}

  Scope limitation · Theoretical argument. On the record

  Related mechanism Proposed Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors: A guarantee processor on the chip would give the tamper-resistant, authenticated telemetry path the flaw says is missing. A pointer, not evidence that this failure is mitigated. Add

• Timing challenges do not identify the individual chip in On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

  GEMM and VDF challenges can be answered by identical GPUs elsewhere, and floating-point fingerprints distinguish GPU models, not individual devices. GPU virtualization adds timing leakage that prevents attributing compute use. ¹⁵

  Scope limitation · Theoretical argument. On the record

Open questions

• Low-communication training reduces the bandwidth training needs in Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

  DiLoCo matched fully synchronous training on 8 workers while communicating 500 times less. Rahman writes that this family of methods theoretically allows large-scale training with less than 100 Mbps. Lucid includes these methods in its bounds, but notes that extreme activation compression, architectures with unusually small inter-layer widths, or modular paradigms could erode the margin. ^{9 13 14}

  Open question · Theoretical argument. On the record

• No quantified error rates or formal thresholds for timing primitives in On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

  Monfared et al. state that false-positive and false-negative rates are not quantified and leave hardware-specific formal thresholds to future work. ¹⁵

  Open question · Open question. On the record

Not yet demonstrated

Proposed Chip location verification

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

• Research demo Tamper evidence for verifier devices Add
  • Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization waits on it. Shaping devices and routing assignments must be trusted by both parties; Amodo has not yet fully analysed resilience to a compromised DPU.
• Proposed Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors Add
  • On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters waits on it. Shipping accelerators need a tamper-resistant, authenticated telemetry path.
• Proposed Network taps and certifiers Add
  • Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization waits on it. The verifier must know that all traffic leaving a pod crosses the capped, monitored links.
• Operational use TEE remote attestation for AI workloads Add
  • Chip location verification depends on it.
  • On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters depends on it.

Missing prerequisites

• Operational use TEE remote attestation for AI workloads needed by Chip location verification and On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters Add
• Research demo Tamper evidence for verifier devices needed by Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization Add

Shared foundations

• TEE remote attestation for AI workloads relied on by Chip location verification and On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

Blockers

12 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 20}
  • 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}
• Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization
  • No cap that a verifier can check has been implemented or red-teamed. Adversarial validation ⁹
  • The verifier must know that all traffic leaving a pod crosses the capped, monitored links. Coverage & hidden compute. Waits on Network taps and certifiers ¹⁰
  • Shaping devices and routing assignments must be trusted by both parties; Amodo has not yet fully analysed resilience to a compromised DPU. Hardware trust. Waits on Tamper evidence for verifier devices ^{9 12}
  • Advances in low-communication training could shrink the margin that the cap enforces. Capacity bounds ^{9 13 14}
• On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters
  • Shipping accelerators need a tamper-resistant, authenticated telemetry path. Hardware trust. Waits on Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors ^{16 17}
  • NVIDIA's full confidential-computing mode disables the hardware performance counters its profiling tools use, so telemetry that needs them conflicts with it. Privacy & leakage ^{18 19}
  • Continuous challenge puzzles cost power and throughput on production workloads. Performance & compatibility ¹⁵
  • Evaluation has not gone beyond single nodes, framework-level evasion and one vendor's hardware. Adversarial validation ¹⁷

From the family or selected implementation's record. ?

Model weights

Depends on the design for On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters.

Not involved: Chip location verification and Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization.

Inputs and outputs

Depends on the design for On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters.

Not involved: Chip location verification and Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization.

Training data

Depends on the design for On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters.

Not involved: Chip location verification and Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization.

Chip location verification

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

Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization

• Proposed AI 2040 inference-only verification stack Proposed architecture, AI Futures Project
• Proposed RAND secure inference data center (SIDC) design Proposed architecture, RAND

On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters

None on the map

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. Verification Plan, R. Dean (2026). Original
9. Traffic Shaping for Workload Classification, Lucid Computing (2026). Original
10. A System Overview for Near-Term, Low-Trust AI Compute Verification, N. Cankaya (2026). Original
11. De-risking Interconnect Limits for AI Verification, A. Scher et al. (2026). Original
12. The Tray as a Bandwidth Boundary, Amodo Design (2026). Original
13. DiLoCo: Distributed Low-Communication Training of Language Models, A. Douillard et al. (2024). Original
14. Does Distributed Training Undermine Compute Governance?, R. Rahman (2026). Original
15. Timing and Memory Telemetry on GPUs for AI Governance, S. K. Monfared et al. (2026). Original
16. Guaranteeable Memory: An HBM-Based Chiplet for Verifiable AI Workloads, J. Petrie (2025). Original
17. Detecting Hidden ML Training With Zero-Overhead Telemetry, R. Rahman & S. Tajdari (2026). Original
18. On TEEs for Privacy-Preserving Monitoring in AI Governance, Gloria Z (2026). Original
19. NVIDIA Secure AI with Blackwell and Hopper GPUs (White Paper), NVIDIA (2025). Original
20. Hardware-Level Governance of AI Compute: A Feasibility Taxonomy for Regulatory Compliance and Treaty Verification, S. Ansari (2026). Original