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Presented at DEF CON 34

Silence, with Receipts.

  • Matthew Nardizzi (author)Vortex Black
  • James Derella (presenter)Vortex Black

Abstract

Your AI is already acting — reading, sending, deploying — faster than any team can watch. Tex (Sovereign Security Engine) is autonomous security for that world: it handles what your AI is doing so people don't have to. Every action routed through Tex is judged before it runs — permit, hold, or forbid — with no default-permit path. And Tex knows when the AI needs a human: anything it can't certify lands on a hold carrying the one fact a person must supply — or the reason no fact will — and only a named human seal clears it. Everything else stays silent.

In a 24-day continuous synthetic fleet run (20 agents, July 5–29, 2026), Tex ruled 1,116,689 decisions on its own: 77.3% permitted, 21.1% forbidden, and 1.6% held for a human — all a human would ever see. Every verdict seals to a hash-chained receipt, and the human's answer becomes a second receipt on the same chain: testimony, not telemetry. The published bundle re-verifies offline from a fresh clone of the public repo — a 12-attack tamper matrix and 34 independent checks anyone can run. Change one byte, or re-sign with your own key, and it fails. Design, not hope.

Coverage is a deployment property: these results cover actions routed through Tex. Don't trust the abstract — clone the repo and try to forge a receipt.