Feb 2, 2026

Blind Audit

Giles Edkins, Owen Walker

Verify that data doesn't contain bad stuff by running challenges against it in a trusted execution environment

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

Arrow
Arrow
Arrow
Arrow
Arrow

The core idea is solid and could receive more development. The most important next steps would be demonstrating a non-trivial challenge script beyond toy PII detection, articulating the realistic threat model more carefully (under what circumstances would a data provider cooperate, and what attacks remain possible even with TEE guarantees?), and completing the basic academic scaffolding — a conclusion, references to the TEE and AI audit literatures, and an honest assessment of what the Merkle root commitment actually buys without a counterpart protocol linking it to training runs.

I like the approach and technical detail. One question for the authors: To what extent does this approach rely on the TEE being robust? If an adversary were to undermine or tamper with the TEE, would that allow them to undermine the effectiveness of this approach?

Another question: Under what circumstances would it really be critical for someone to verify that a training dataset was safe *other than* the model provider (which presumably has access to the training dataset and therefore does not require this kind of setup)? To some extent I understand the case for verifying this in sensitive industries. Even in this setup, one could simply imagine the frontier model provider certifying that the dataset is safe (and bearing some sort of cost if that claim ends up being false in a way that causes harm).

Nonetheless, this was a cool approach, and I would encourage the authors to consider how it could apply to other problem sets.

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) Blind Audit

},

author={

Giles Edkins, Owen Walker

},

date={

2/2/26

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

Recent Projects

View All

View All

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Fingerprinting All AI Cluster I/O Without Mutually Trusted Processors

We design and simulate a "border patrol" device for generating cryptographic evidence of data traffic entering and leaving an AI cluster, while eliminating the specific analog and steganographic side-channels that post-hoc verification can not close. The device eliminates the need for any mutually trusted logic, while still meeting the security needs of the prover and verifier.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Markov Chain Lock Watermarking: Provably Secure Authentication for LLM Outputs

We present Markov Chain Lock (MCL) watermarking, a cryptographically secure framework for authenticating LLM outputs. MCL constrains token generation to follow a secret Markov chain over SHA-256 vocabulary partitions. Using doubly stochastic transition matrices, we prove four theoretical guarantees: (1) exponentially decaying false positive rates via Hoeffding bounds, (2) graceful degradation under adversarial modification with closed-form expected scores, (3) information-theoretic security without key access, and (4) bounded quality loss via KL divergence. Experiments on 173 Wikipedia prompts using Llama-3.2-3B demonstrate that the optimal 7-state soft cycle configuration achieves 100\% detection, 0\% FPR, and perplexity 4.20. Robustness testing confirms detection above 96\% even with 30\% word replacement. The framework enables $O(n)$ model-free detection, addressing EU AI Act Article 50 requirements. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ChenghengLi/MCLW}

Read More

Feb 2, 2026

Prototyping an Embedded Off-Switch for AI Compute

This project prototypes an embedded off-switch for AI accelerators. The security block requires periodic cryptographic authorization to operate: the chip generates a nonce, an external authority signs it, and the chip verifies the signature before granting time-limited permission. Without valid authorization, outputs are gated to zero. The design was implemented in HardCaml and validated in simulation.

Read More

This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.