Hardware-Agnostic Kinetic Integrity (HAKI): A Physical Proof-of-State Protocol for Trustless Computing
Calisto N. Jabura · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
Executive Summary HAKI (Hardware-Agnostic Kinetic Integrity) aims to fill the most critical unexplored gap in current computing security: that software is utterly unable to check the physical integrity of the hardware upon which it is executing. Although decades of progress have made software more resistant to logical exploits, the hardware layer has been a silent, trusted and unprovable base – an assumption which is now empirically demonstrated false. Based on the strain gauge in civil engineering - a device that measures the micro-scale physical stress that a structure is under, prior to structural failure happens - HAKI has created a Digital Strain Gauge of silicon. It constantly flips cryptographically insignificant and physically significant 'Ghost Instructions' via the CPU, RAM, and cache hierarchy, and measures the sub-nanosecond timing echo, power-draw inference and cross-architecture result consistency to generate a physical proof-of-state (PPoS) of each calculation. The issue that HAKI addresses is a financially disastrous as well as structurally unresolved one. In a seminal study published by Meta in 2021, researchers discovered so-called mercurial cores, or CPUs that, when supplied with a particular voltage, silently compute some mathematical string erroneously. Internal research conducted by Google has reported rates of silent data corruption (SDC) of 1 per a few thousand nodes - in hyperscale, that is, thousands of unseen errors per day. Examples of a documented financial exposure in the industry are: Unity Technologies, lost 110M in revenue due to corrupted data in one quarter, the Amazon S3 cascading failure which occurred due to a single bit-flip, and the Toyota lawsuit which resulted in a legal settlement of 1.2B+ because of corrupted bit-flips in safety-critical automotive firmware due to cosmic rays. The existing mitigations (ECC RAM, checksumming (ZFS/BTRFS), TPMs, and redundant voting systems) are at the software or firmware layer. All of them are unable to identify a physical hardware attack or degradation event in real-time in the computation. All of them are reactive, post-hoc or structurally constrained. HAKI is the initial physical Proof-of-State system fully software-deployable and proactive, and computation-time.