The Trustless Computing Certification Body and Seevik Net Initiative

The Trustless Computing Certification Body and Seevik Net Initiative (“Initiative”) is an ongoing effort for the establishment of a new intergovernmental agency for the sensitive and diplomatic communications and control systems for the most advanced AIs, social media feed system and other critical societal systems. While standalone, TCCB is one of the three agencies proposed by our Harnessing AI Risk Initiative to manage AI and digital communications for the global public good.

The Initiative is aggregating a critical mass of globally-diverse states, intergovernmental organizations and neutral INGOs to build new open, neutral and participatory intergovernmental organizations to develop and certify radically more trustworthy, widely trusted and accountable end-to-end IT systems, for use in (1) confidential and diplomatic communications (Seevik Net) and (2) control subsystems for critical AIs, social media and other critical systems (Seevik Controls) - while enabling legitimate lawful access, national and international.

The TCCB will guarantee both radically-unprecedented levels of confidentiality and integrity and democratic control as well as national and international legitimate lawful access, by applying the Trustless Computing Paradigms, new win-win IT security paradigms based on uncompromising transparency, time-tested oversight and participatory global governance models, extreme security-review in relation to complexity, and multi-national battle-tested open-source technologies.

Problems

  • (1) The trustworthiness of control subsystems for advanced AIs:

    • Minimized and ultra-secure technical and socio-technical IT systems and standards, referred to as high-assurance, are utilized today to maximize the security, privacy, safety and accountability of control subsystems of critical infrastructure that are society-critical and inherently complex, such as Frontier AIs and their development infrastructure. 

    • While there has been an enormous increase in the foreseen global cost of failures of those systems due to accident, hacking or misuse, even top national security agencies have shown a failure to safeguard their most critical data, as shown by Shadow Brokers, OPM and Vault 7 hacks. 

  • (2) The trustworthiness of sensitive digital communications.

    • Heads of states, heads of opposition, ministers, elected officials, journalists and top scientists do not access to interoperable computing devices and services that enable them to protect the confidentiality of their sensitive and off-the-record communications against innumerable state and non-state hacking entities - and so are forced to rely only or mostly on in-person meetings to further global cooperation and diplomatic initiatives. 

    • Exemplificatory of this need is the fact that the Ambassador of Liechtenstein to the UN stated that Covid delayed 2 years the approval of the UN Veto Initiative, evidently because remote digital communications (even in 2020) were not able to sustain key diplomatic negotiations.

Solution

The Initiative entails the creation a new intergovernmental IT security certification and governance body via participatory and neutral constituent processes, TCCB, and an initial infrastructure and ecosystems compliant with TCCB based on battle-tested and open systems including, Seevik Net, which includes: (1) a new modular endpoint platform, for use as client, server and control systems: (2) a new multinational, neutral and redundant cloud infrastructure and supply chain ecosystem.

  • (1) TCCB Devices: an endpoint platform for client devices, made of a 2mm-thin ultra-secure mobile device, carried in custom leather wallets or embedded in the back of Android, iOS or Harmony smartphones. Via such form factor, it will initially be running alongside current hegemonic mobile devices, apps and cloud services, instead of trying to replace them.

  • (2) TCCB Controls and Servers: an initial TCCB-compliant endpoint platform for server and control systems for frontier AIs and social media feeds systems and suitable for critical functions, such as compliance, access controls, security monitoring, firmware upgrade and value systems. (In the diagram, a sample TCCB deployment for a generic critical AI for sensitive client-server use cases)

Progress & Traction

As detailed 25-pages Traction Update, in addition to nine states and three IGOs interested to join the Initiative, high officials of six states from Africa, Asia and South America, including three Permanent Representatives of their Missions to the UN in Geneva, have signed up as prospective partners in FSC19 and FSC11 workshops we held in Geneva in Q2 2023.
So far, we've built the fine technical, socio-technical and governance details of the certification body, and launched it in 2021 at the presence of prestigious personalities. We built a proof-of-concept device of a complaint Seevik Pod and Seevik Phone. We have designed a large part of the supply chain and ecosystem, while the rest will be completed with strategic firms from participating states.

Roadmap

We’ll be holding several preparatory meetings leading up to the 12th Edition of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace, in Geneva next June, 12-13th 2024. By mid 2024, we aim to select a limited number globally-diverse states, IGOs and NGOs to become the initial cofounder partners (CHF 2,000,000) of such open intergovernmental joint-venture to build and govern the 1st global democratic digital communications infrastructure. A few more will be selected to join as mere governance partners (CHF 20,000/year). 

Neutrality

Given how central neutrality is to our Initiative, the current cyber superpowers of the USA, China and Israel are very highly welcome to join the Initiative as cofounder or governance partners and join FSC12 but their application will be held in suspension until all three of them will have applied (as you can read in chapter 13 of our Executive Summary, or here on our site).

Why and How Lawful Access?

Since the commercial availability of those levels of security have de-facto consistently and structurally proven to be incompatible with global public safety, the same extreme safeguards that ensure radically higher trustworthiness will be applied to applied to ensure sufficiently secure mechanisms for their in-person procedural legitimate lawful access, national and international, within the confines of current national and international laws.

For more information, download below (1) a 40-page Executive Summary (pdf), preceded by this Intro 1-Pager and by a Briefing 12-pager, and (2) a 33-page Introduction Slides (pdf), for our offer in fine detail: