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.

1. 01

   Local-first by default

   All operator state lives in ~/.hyve/ on your machine, encrypted with vault-derived keys. At idle the OS does not phone home, send telemetry, or upload activity. Opt-in features you turn on — encrypted messaging's connectivity relays, maps, and the manual update check — reach only the specific services they need; nothing else leaves the box. Relay endpoints carry only end-to-end-encrypted payloads we cannot decrypt.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 04

   Cryptographic recovery

   DataCore archives are encrypted per chunk with AES-256-GCM under a key derived from your vault, with an Ed25519-signed root hash you can verify entirely offline — so you can prove an archive is authentic and untampered. Vault recovery uses Shamir 3-of-5 social threshold — your trusted contacts can collectively help you recover, no single party ever has full access.

5. 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.

• Post-Quantum Encrypted by Construction

  Every 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.

• Sovereign Data Protocol (.hyvedata)

  Per-chunk Brotli + AES-256-GCM encryption with an Ed25519-signed root hash you can verify offline, plus SQLite-indexed metadata; one vault unlock decrypts every archive. (NOT yet in the shipped build: Reed-Solomon GF(256) parity shards + Particle-Swarm-Optimized layout for partial-corruption survival — the designed next layer.)

• HYVE Uniform Transport (HYVE-UT)

  Every 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)

  Messages 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)

  Routing 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)

  Per-conversation epochs with chain-key rotation via HKDF-SHA256 and zeroized prior keys. Compromising current state never compromises past traffic.

• Sovereign OS Architecture

  Two-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

  A 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

  SHA-256 hash, Brotli compression, AES-256-GCM per-chunk encryption, SQLite metadata, Ed25519-signed root hash — the shipping archive flow. (Reed-Solomon parity + PSO layout are the not-yet-shipped corruption-recovery layer.)

• Per-Organ Identity Isolation

  Each 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

  PIN, 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

  Network-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

  Constant-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

  Operator-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

  Operator-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

  Operator 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

  Multi-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

  Hardening 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

  Pairing 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)

  HYVE_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

  Tactical-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)

  Evidence 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

  Operator 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

  Anomaly 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

  Defensive 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

  Training data inherits classification labels deterministically — derived models cannot accidentally produce outputs at lower classification than their inputs.

• Decoupled Binary/Policy Accreditation Signing

  Threshold 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

  Wire-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

  Single source briefing rendered for multiple audiences (operator, command, allied, public) with per-audience classification awareness — automatic redaction at each tier.

• Sentinel Hardware Kill-Switches

  Camera 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.

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.