FOUNDATIONS

Foundations you can measure.

Everything QCore ships stands on four foundations: AI that shows its working, secrets rooted in physics, resistance measured at the power rail, and cryptography implemented as dedicated silicon engines and measured software. This page explains each one plainly.

AI that shows its working

Machine learning runs through every QCore platform — but always explainable, always auditable, and always deployable off-grid. A model whose verdicts cannot be interrogated has no place in a defence system.

Detection
Krypten's rule engine and risk scoring; DRISHTI's explainable threat scores with confidence-graded identity correlation.
Vision
YOLOv8 fine-tuned on real-world imagery in DRISHTI-AR and DRONA-NET, engineered to run on CPU-class and edge hardware — with classical CV as an independent second opinion.
Behavioural
Isolation Forest manoeuvre detection in VYOMA, emitting score, label, and confidence with every verdict.
Graph
A multiplex graph over the MITRE ATT&CK STIX corpus: community detection, centrality analysis, and attack-path extraction from initial access to impact — air-gap capable.
Prediction
Weibull hazard modelling per airframe zone in DRISHTI-AR; AI prognostic health for drone fleets in DRONA-NET.

Cryptography as an engineering discipline

A cipher is only as strong as the engineering around it. We build the whole chain — entropy source to key lifecycle to constant-time implementation — in our own silicon and our own software, and then we measure it at the power rail.

Key establishment with forward secrecy: an X25519 ephemeral exchange and hardware entropy from an SP 800-90 TRNG feed HKDF-SHA256, bound to the handshake transcript, producing session keys for ChaCha20-Poly1305; alerts and control messages are digitally signed Two parallel boxes on the left, an X25519 ephemeral key exchange providing forward secrecy and an SP 800-90 hardware TRNG providing health-tested entropy. Both flow into an HKDF-SHA256 key schedule that is bound to the handshake transcript. The output session keys feed ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated framing. A separate lane shows digital signatures applied to alerts and control messages. A caption notes that compromising a long-term key tomorrow leaves yesterday's traffic sealed. X25519 EPHEMERAL EXCHANGE forward secrecy per session fresh keys, every time SP 800-90 TRNG hardware entropy source, health-tested continuously HKDF-SHA256 combined key schedule, bound to handshake transcript SESSION KEYS ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated framing DIGITAL SIGNATURES alerts & control messages COMPROMISE A LONG-TERM KEY TOMORROW — YESTERDAY'S TRAFFIC STAYS SEALED
The same construction runs in Krypten's software channel; the same engines run in our silicon.
HARDWARE ENGINES

Cryptography in silicon

AES-256 (GCM/XTS/KW), SHA-2/SHA-3/SHAKE, HMAC, RSA, ECC (P-256/384/521 — ECDSA/ECDH), and X25519 — implemented as dedicated engines in QC-SE100 and Q-HSM, not as library calls.

KEY LIFECYCLE

Keys as a managed lifecycle

Generate, wrap, transport, unwrap, destroy — offline-capable end to end in CoreFabric™ AG, and sealed to the die by PUF in CoreVault™: never stored, never exported.

IMPLEMENTATION

Entropy & discipline

SP 800-90 TRNGs with continuous health tests; constant-time implementations and masked operations throughout; side-channel hardening designed in at RTL — and then measured.

Secrets rooted in physics

A PUF — a physically unclonable function — is a fingerprint burned into silicon by physics itself. Microscopic variation in the manufacturing of every die produces a response no other chip can reproduce and no attacker can read out at rest, because at rest it does not exist as data.

Our designs read that fingerprint through a constant-time fuzzy extractor, correcting the natural noise in the physical response without leaking timing information, then feed the result into on-die key generation. The consequence is architectural: there is no stored root secret. Nothing to dump from flash, nothing to decap and probe for, nothing to exfiltrate.

This is the engine inside CoreZero™ and the sealing mechanism behind CoreVault™ — keys derived on demand, used, and gone.

PROPERTY 01

Unclonable by construction

The secret is manufacturing variation itself — not even the fab that made the die can make another one like it.

PROPERTY 02

Nothing stored, nothing stolen

Keys are regenerated from the PUF response each time. Power off the device and the root secret ceases to exist.

PROPERTY 03

Constant-time extraction

The fuzzy extractor runs in constant time, so the error-correction step cannot become a side channel of its own.

Measured at the power rail

Real attackers do not attack the mathematics; they watch power consumption, electromagnetic emission, and timing. We design against those channels — and then we measure, because a countermeasure that has not been measured is a hope.

DESIGN

Countermeasures in RTL

Constant-time implementations, masked operations, and protected key paths designed into our cores from the first line of RTL — not patched in after a lab report.

EVALUATE

Attack-side evaluation

Power and EM analysis of our own designs and our clients' — the same bench methodology offered as an engineering service for third-party hardware.

HARDEN

Beyond the channel

Anti-tamper sensing with automatic zeroization, JTAG and debug lockdown, hardware trojan detection, TRNG validation, and FPGA bitstream security.

Standards we build to

Interoperability is a security property. These are the specifications our products implement or align with — stated plainly, claimed only where true.

FIPS 140-3
Q-HSM carries a FIPS 140-3 Level 3 design target for its ASIC realisation — a design target, not a certification claim. QC-SE100 is engineered to the same discipline.
SP 800-90
True random number generation with continuous health testing, in QC-SE100 and Q-HSM.
MeitY ER / STQC / AIS-140
QC-SE100 is designed against the MeitY Essential Requirements for CCTV security, the STQC certification regime, smart-metering / AMI security guidelines, and AIS-140 telematics.
CIS Benchmarks
Continuous endpoint compliance measurement in Prahari; configuration hardening reviews ingested by PARAKH.
OWASP
Web application security testing methodology behind PARAKH-delivered assessments.
WCAG 2.1 AA / GIGW 3.0
Automated accessibility and Indian-government mandatory-element checks in SUGAM.
MITRE ATT&CK
Detection mapping in Krypten and the STIX-based multiplex graph research layer.
CCSDS
Conjunction screening in VYOMA aligned with CCSDS conjunction data conventions.
STANAG 4586 / MAVLink v2
Drone command interoperability in DRONA-NET across quad, VTOL, fixed-wing, and hex platforms.
CycloneDX / SPDX
SBOM ingestion in Krypten, matched against CVE data and the CISA KEV catalogue.
OpenAPI 3.1 / Prometheus
Machine-readable APIs and metrics across our software platforms.

Where the trust line goes next

A public roadmap keeps us honest. Demonstrated means you can see it today; in progress means the work is underway; target means we have said so out loud and intend to be held to it.

  1. Demonstrated

    Root of trust on live silicon DONE

    Hardware-verified secure boot, measured boot with PCRs, and remote attestation running on Zynq UltraScale+ class and Artix-7 class devices — attestation verdicts gating live container workloads.

  2. Demonstrated

    Hardened secure channel in production software DONE

    Krypten's forward-secret transport with digitally signed alerts, exercised by a 178-assertion end-to-end suite.

  3. Demonstrated

    QCore Trust Suite live demos DONE

    All eight products — from CoreZero™ PUF key generation to CoreSign™ threshold distributed signing — shown working on physical hardware.

  4. In progress

    Q-HSM integration hardening IN PROGRESS

    Expanding the RISC-V HSM core's algorithm coverage and integration interfaces toward its ASIC realisation and FIPS 140-3 Level 3 design target.

  5. In progress

    Platform convergence IN PROGRESS

    Deeper coupling across the stack — DRISHTI intelligence feeding Krypten detections; CoreAttest™ device trust informing platform risk scoring.

  6. In progress

    QC-SE100 to Indian fabrication IN PROGRESS

    Carrying the QC-SE100 secure element family through fabrication and certification in India — STQC and the MeitY Essential Requirements — with side-channel evaluation at each milestone.

NEXT STEP

Argue with our engineers.

Technical evaluations come with the people who wrote the RTL and the detection rules. Bring hard questions.