Once a satellite's AI decides, nobody on the ground can check it.
Onboard AI saves bandwidth by throwing data away and acts faster by raising alerts in orbit. What it saw, what it decided and whether the record was changed later are invisible. As insurance payouts, emissions reports and security decisions start to depend on those calls, "trust us" stops being enough.
A flight recorder for onboard AI.
Record
Each decision becomes a record: the image's fingerprint, the exact model weights, the score and the verdict.
Sign the pass
Records chain into a Merkle tree. At the end of the pass the satellite signs one small summary.
Lock in alerts
An alert is signed the moment it fires. The final pass must extend it, so history can't be rewritten afterwards, even by the key holder.
Verify anywhere
Anyone with the public key checks the pass, or any single image, kept or discarded, on their own machine.
Re-run
A second machine recomputes sampled decisions with the same model and flags any it wouldn't have made.
Standard cryptography throughout: SHA-256, RFC 6962 Merkle trees and Ed25519. It sits beside your existing models and leaves the radio link and its security to the platform.
- pass
- pass-wildfire-0142
- decisions
- 300 · 86 kept · 211 discarded · 3 alerts
- status
- OK
- alerts locked
- 3 checkpoints
- root
- 82abf4e9aac899cc2665…5cc2d4be
- key
- d42d2a07c9df2295
- signature
- 4011f1d89695dd58…5b0fa601
- size
- 926 bytes for the whole pass
Check a pass in your browser in ten seconds.
The verifier runs entirely on your device and loads no outside code. Try the tampered sample: its signature still checks out, and the verifier still catches the rewritten history and the swapped fire image.
Open the verifier →What we've measured, and what comes next.
| Claim | Figure | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Automated tests, laptop and Android ARM handset | 24 / 24 | IMPLEMENTED |
| Time to record one 64 kB image on an ARM handset, two runs | 1.8–2.1 ms | MEASURED |
| Fire alert signed and ready after detection | ~5 ms | MEASURED |
| Signed summary for a 2,000-image pass | 713 B | MEASURED |
| Proof about any single image, including discarded ones | ~1 kB | MEASURED |
| History rewritten and re-signed with the real key is caught | caught | TESTED · SIMULATED ATTACK |
| Corrupted onboard decision caught by a ground re-run | caught | TESTED · SIMULATED FAULT |
| Real satellite imagery | — | NEXT |
| Flight-representative hardware, then in orbit | — | PILOT |
Anyone who has to defend a machine's decision to someone else.
- Satellite operators
- Prove to customers what your onboard AI kept, discarded and flagged, for under a kilobyte per pass.
- Parametric insurers
- Satellite-triggered payouts get a record both sides can check, so fewer disputes about the data.
- Emissions monitoring
- Detections that hold up when the operator concerned disputes them.
- Defence and space security
- Tamper-evident records of autonomous decisions, jamming and intrusions, with re-runs that expose faulty or manipulated ones.
- Ground stations
- A neutral record that a pass was delivered complete and unaltered.
- AI assurance
- The same engine proves any AI decision on any device. Orbit is simply the hardest place to do it.
What the satellite decided, on which image, with which model version, in what order, and that none of it changed afterwards.
That the decision was right: a verified fire alert proves the AI said "fire", not that there was one. Wall-clock time needs a trusted time source, which isn't in place yet.