SECURITY · POSTURE
Sovereignty is not a feature. It is the substrate.
Every part of HYVE Ether OS is built so that no party — not us, not your ISP, not a future quantum-capable adversary — can read your data without your explicit consent. This page documents the five principles, the cryptographic primitives, and the certifications.
Five principles.
01
Local-first by default
All operator state lives in ~/.hyve/ on your machine, encrypted with vault-derived keys. The OS does not phone home, send telemetry, or upload activity. Relay endpoints carry only end-to-end-encrypted payloads we cannot decrypt.
02
Post-quantum by construction
ML-KEM-768 key exchange + 512-byte uniform cells + ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD + Ed25519 signatures across the substrate. Built for the day quantum computers break the rest of the internet — your data is encrypted against that day starting today.
03
Hardware below software
Camera, microphone, and other privacy-sensitive peripherals are gated at the kernel module level — below the userspace, below the browser. No software can override the hardware kill.
04
Cryptographic recovery
DataCore archives use Reed-Solomon GF(256) shard recovery — your archives survive partial corruption. Vault recovery uses Shamir 3-of-5 social threshold — your trusted contacts can collectively help you recover, no single party ever has full access.
05
Auditable decisions
Omega's decide() function is deterministic — same input, same output, every time, under 200 ns per rule. Every decision is reconstructible in Observatory. Auditors can replay any decision exactly.
Security features index.
Every security-relevant feature shipping in HYVE Ether OS, with patent-pending status flagged. Full claim list at /patents.
Post-Quantum Encrypted by Construction
PATENT PENDINGEvery byte on the substrate flows through a 512-byte uniform encrypted cell — ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD, ML-KEM-768 key exchange, Ed25519 signatures, blind routing tokens. Built for the day quantum computers break the rest of the internet.
Patent-Pending Data Protocol (.hyvedata)
PATENT PENDINGPer-chunk Brotli + AES-256-GCM, Reed-Solomon GF(256) parity shards, Particle-Swarm-Optimized layout, SQLite-indexed metadata, Ed25519-signed root hash. Survives partial corruption. One vault unlock decrypts every archive.
HYVE Uniform Transport (HYVE-UT)
PATENT PENDINGEvery message on the inter-organ bus is a fixed 512-byte cell — header, nonce, encrypted payload, Poly1305 tag. Same size regardless of payload, eliminating size-based traffic analysis attacks.
HYVE Cell-Sharded Transport (HYVE-CST)
PATENT PENDINGMessages exceeding 387 bytes are split via Shamir K-of-N secret sharing applied per byte position over GF(256). Any K cells reconstruct the original; any K-1 cells reveal nothing.
HYVE Blind Routing Tokens (HYVE-BRT)
PATENT PENDINGRouting tokens are HKDF-SHA256 over the chain key, swarm identifier, and cell sequence index. Cells of the same conversation are unlinkable to relays without the chain key.
HYVE Ratchet (Forward Secrecy at Message Granularity)
PATENT PENDINGPer-conversation epochs with chain-key rotation via HKDF-SHA256 and zeroized prior keys. Compromising current state never compromises past traffic.
Sovereign OS Architecture
PATENT PENDINGTwo-tier key hierarchy (PIN + biometric → KEK → DEK), multi-organ topology over the cell substrate, GF(256) Shamir K-of-N recovery, .hyvedata signed-shard archive, deterministic decide() runtime — all in one architecture.
Tarpit + Tor + Sentinel Defensive Triad
PATENT PENDINGA tarpit organ that drips fake banners to attackers for hours, a Tor controller organ with pluggable transports (obfs4, meek_lite, snowflake), and a sentinel kill organ for cross-platform process termination — all audit-logged.
.hyvedata Generation Pipeline
PATENT PENDINGSHA-256 hash, Brotli compression, AES-256-GCM per-chunk encryption, Reed-Solomon GF(256) parity, Particle-Swarm-Optimized layout, SQLite metadata, Ed25519-signed root hash. The full archive flow.
Per-Organ Identity Isolation
PATENT PENDINGEach organ presents an authentication record at startup: organ name, epoch counter, ML-KEM-768 key encapsulation token, Ed25519 signature. Organs without verified signatures are rejected by the bus.
Multi-Factor Auth + Panic-Wipe PIN
PATENT PENDINGPIN, password, gesture, face biometric, fingerprint biometric — at least one combination required to unlock. A second 'panic' PIN at the unlock prompt marks the data partition for irreversible secure wipe on next reboot.
Cover-Cell Traffic Analysis Defense
PATENT PENDINGNetwork-indistinguishable decoy cells generated with cryptographically random payload bytes and AEAD encryption identical to real cells. Operators maintain constant traffic-rate against passive observers.
Civic Credential Verification Gate
PATENT PENDINGConstant-evaluation credential check before any civic sub-surface accepts operator documents — no document reaches encrypted storage until the unlock gate validates.
Federal Compliance Phased Installer
PATENT PENDINGOperator-paced phased federal-compliance installer at /opt/hyve/fed-compliance/. Phases: banner, audit, sysctl, MAC, strict, all — each adds a coherent set of system-hardening primitives.
Civic Chat Redaction Filter
PATENT PENDINGOperator-visible chat output of any civic sub-surface is filtered through a redaction function before display — protects against accidental leakage of sensitive civic data.
Shell-Script Generation Injection Defense
PATENT PENDINGOperator parameters validated against per-parameter constraint sets (URL scheme allowlists, control-character rejection, length caps). Validated values written to mode-0600 sidecar env files; scripts read via shell builtins, never heredoc-interpolated.
Timing-Leak-Free Credential Verification
PATENT PENDINGMulti-factor unlock with length-capped inputs, parallel Argon2id derivations without short-circuit, bitwise-AND combination, and uniform error message on failure — defends against side-channel timing attacks.
Staged Operator-Paced OS Hardening
PATENT PENDINGHardening installer with phase argument (banner / audit / sysctl / mac / strict / all) — each phase is auditable and reversible via revert phase that restores the prior baseline snapshot.
Cross-Device Pairing Without Centralized Server
PATENT PENDINGPairing token + ephemeral Ed25519 keypair encoded in a QR code; second device scans, opens TCP handshake, exchanges cell-substrate messages to establish a HYVE-Ratchet keyed by the operator's long-lived identity. No centralized pairing service.
Operator-Controlled Signaling-Relay (Sovereignty Default Empty)
PATENT PENDINGHYVE_RELAY_URL defaults empty. Features that need a relay surface an operator-actionable opt-in notification; setter enforces HTTPS-only + URL-parser validation; persisted to mode-0600 env file. Re-read at every send call site — zero-restart updates.
Capability-Bounded LLM Execution
PATENT PENDINGTactical-tier LLM execution where the model's available actions are bounded by a capability manifest at invocation time. The model literally cannot reach beyond its declared scope — hard isolation, not prompt suggestion.
Time-Locked Decryption (Verifiable Delay Function)
PATENT PENDINGEvidence sealed under a verifiable-delay-function gate that mathematically resists early decryption — useful for legal evidence chain-of-custody where reveal time must be controllable and provable.
Mesh-Distributed Persona With Duress Auto-Shred
PATENT PENDINGOperator persona threshold-sharded across a mesh of devices. A duress signal silently triggers persona auto-shred — coercion against any single device cannot reconstruct the persona.
Typing-Rhythm Duress Detection
PATENT PENDINGAnomaly detection over the operator's typing-rhythm baseline — sudden departure from established patterns triggers a silent duress signal across the persona mesh.
Self-Mutating Defenses With Bounded Mutation
PATENT PENDINGDefensive postures evolve under bounded mutation — the system varies its own surface to resist signature-based attacks without exceeding operator-set safety boundaries.
Deterministic Classification Inheritance for ML Training
PATENT PENDINGTraining data inherits classification labels deterministically — derived models cannot accidentally produce outputs at lower classification than their inputs.
Decoupled Binary/Policy Accreditation Signing
PATENT PENDINGThreshold signing for accreditation that decouples the signed binary from the signed policy — binaries can be re-accredited without re-signing policy, and vice versa.
AEAD-Nonce-Bound Caveat Enforcement
PATENT PENDINGWire-layer caveat enforcement bound into AEAD nonce material — caveats cannot be stripped without invalidating the cell's authentication tag.
Classification-Aware Multi-Audience Briefing Synthesis
PATENT PENDINGSingle source briefing rendered for multiple audiences (operator, command, allied, public) with per-audience classification awareness — automatic redaction at each tier.
Sentinel Hardware Kill-Switches
PATENT PENDINGCamera and microphone cut at the kernel module level, below userspace, below the browser. No software can override the hardware kill.
HYVE Identity
Sovereign on-device identity: X25519 master keypair, Shamir 3-of-5 social recovery, HKDF-derived scoped tokens. No cloud account required, ever.
CONTINUOUS INTERNAL AUDIT
No known high or critical issues
We run a continuous internal security audit across the OS and the website. As of the current build there are no known high- or critical-severity issues; lower-severity findings are triaged, mitigated, and scheduled against upcoming builds as a normal part of development. We patch high-severity issues within 7 days of confirmation and credit good-faith reporters.
CERTIFICATION STATUS · IN PREPARATION
SOC 2 Type II — In Preparation, Not Yet Certified
SOC 2 Type II self-assessment in preparation. Several controls are implemented today (type-system-enforced wire shapes, per-tenant key isolation, parameterized SQL, OsRng). Not yet certified — full third-party audit scheduled post-launch.
Reporting a vulnerability.
If you discover a security issue in the OS, the website, or the relay endpoints, please email majixx@vibesoftwaresolutions.com with details. We acknowledge within 48 hours, ship a fix within 7 days for high-severity issues, and credit reporters in the public findings doc unless you ask otherwise.
We follow coordinated-disclosure norms: please give us a chance to patch before public disclosure. We do not litigate good-faith security research.