Technology
Position In The Stack
Layer 3 is vacant. The trust layer fills it.
Ziru Labs sits at the hardware trust substrate: above silicon architecture and below compute silicon.
Layer
Function
Participants
Market Structure
02
Silicon architecture / ISA
ARM, x86, RISC-V
Single-source per segment
04
Compute silicon
NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, custom accelerators
Competitive, NVIDIA dominant
05
Trusted execution environment
NVIDIA CC, Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, ARM CCA
Vendor-specific, complementary
Architecture
Four architectural tiers.
Ziru Labs solves the trust problem through four integrated tiers, each addressing a class of threat that operates below the software trust boundary.
Tier I
Foundational Hardware Trust
The hardware chain of trust, rooted in the physics of the deployed silicon.
Addresses physical-access attack classes against deployed hardware, including cold-boot extraction of AI infrastructure memory, chip-level probing, chassis-level tampering, and supply chain compromise of deployed boards. Roots the hardware trust chain in the silicon itself.
Tier II
Active inference security
Inference execution bound to hardware-attested cryptographic state.
Addresses runtime attack classes against AI inference integrity, including memory-side extraction of model weights and inference data during active computation, and bus-level interception of inference results. Binds inference execution such that results carry evidence of authentic execution.
Tier III
Structural network elimination
The networked attack surface eliminated at the architectural level.
Addresses lateral-traversal attack classes across AI infrastructure, multi-tenant memory-sharing vulnerabilities, and network-level compromise of high-bandwidth AI clusters. Structurally eliminates the networked attack surface between nodes.
Tier IV
Cognitive governance
AI governance enforced in hardware, persistent across software compromise.
Addresses AI-behavior attacks that survive software-layer governance, including jailbreaks that bypass safety instructions, compromise of alignment mechanisms through software vulnerabilities, and governance constraints that persist only as software configuration. Establishes hardware-enforced governance that holds even when the operator account and the operating system are fully compromised.
Additive to existing silicon-vendor security.
Designed to compose with, rather than replace, existing silicon-vendor security features.
NVIDIA Confidential Computing, AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, and ARM Confidential Compute Architecture provide trusted execution environments within the CPU or GPU. Where those TEEs attest and protect the platform, Ziru Labs proves and enforces the computation itself across the physical-layer, bus-level, firmware-level, and governance-level threats that sit outside the TEE threat model.
The integration thesis is additive. Ziru Labs makes AI deployable in environments that currently cannot accept the residual risk: federal IL6+, allied classified tiers, EU AI Act Article 40 high-risk AI, and frontier-lab deployments where Responsible Scaling commitments must be demonstrated in hardware rather than asserted in software.
What Ziru Labs does not address.
Specific adjacent problems are out of scope by construction.
Foundry-level silicon supply chain
Ziru Labs assumes the silicon vendor's foundational root of trust is intact. Foundry-level compromise is the silicon vendor's domain.
The trusted execution boundary itself
The trusted execution environment is provided by silicon-vendor confidential computing. Ziru Labs operates beneath and around it, composing with the TEE rather than replacing or modifying it.
Model poisoning and adversarial ML
Adversarial-input robustness is addressed at the model layer by adversarial-robustness research.
Software alignment and AI safety research
Alignment research establishes the constraints. Ziru Labs enforces them at the hardware layer where software cannot reach.
Training-data provenance and watermarking
Adjacent domains Ziru Labs composes with but does not itself provide.
Software AI governance and monitoring
Software governance platforms remain useful above the OS. Ziru Labs is the substrate below that they cannot reach.
Ziru Labs holds sixteen patent-pending commercial inventions covering the four architectural tiers, plus seven inventions for specific confidential functions. Utility patent prosecution is active for the core mechanism-level inventions.
IP briefings are available to appropriately cleared counterparties through appropriate channels.