The Open Verification Lab
Building the cryptographic tooling, open infrastructure, and standards for Verifiable AI.
What is open verification
Connecting open verification to Verifiable AI
Autonomous AI agents act at machine speed, requiring continuous, automated evidence rather than manual post-hoc logging. As enterprise capital expenditure accelerates into AI data infrastructure and AI cybersecurity, autonomous agent deployments face critical hurdles around insurance coverage exclusions, execution vulnerabilities, and pre-production pilot stalls.
OPEN VERIFICATION
PROOF-OF-CONTROL
VERIFIABLE AI
THE CATEGORY
THE TECHNICAL STANDARD
THE OPERATIONAL OUTCOME
Open verification
Verification where what you must trust is a mechanism anyone can verify, not a party.
Proof-of-Control
An open standard for tamper-evident evidence, openly verifiable by anyone, that an agent stayed within its controls.
Verifiable AI
The operational outcome: converting autonomous agent usage into insurable, secure, and production-ready enterprise assets.
How the Lab works
Our operating model
The Open Verification Lab operates as an agile, contribution-driven research and shipping engine. Guided by Research Director Jim Schwoebel, the Lab translates security research into open-source software, cryptographic tools, practical guides, and verifiable standards.
Build and ship open tooling
Applied research must lead to software. All projects culminate in open repositories, practical implementation guides, and reproducible benchmarks.
Public-good outputs
What the Lab produces
The Lab delivers four public-good outputs that bridge research and enterprise adoption.
normative requirements across six verification domains.
The standard
Proof-of-Control: an open, industry-led standard.
Read the standard (working draft, open for comment) →
Research papers
Peer-reviewed papers and formal analyses addressing foundational security questions and corrective protocol definitions.
Open tooling
Practical Rust engines, TEE harnesses, and verification proxies that stress-test requirements on real hardware.
Practitioner guidance
Tactical 30/60/90-day execution roadmaps and audit checklists for CISOs and enterprise architects.
Open-source portfolio
Core projects and research tooling
The Lab stewards a focused portfolio of open-source software designed to implement, test, and validate Proof-of-Control across high-stakes environments.
Parallax
Residual trust calculus for confidential computing
A Rust engine and live verification proxy that computes the residual trust dependencies of hardware Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Zero-Knowledge architectures.
Evaluates real attestation quotes against policy, scoring assumptions by PRINCIPAL, CAPABILITY, IMPACT, and DETECT latency to uncover silent trust dependencies.
The Lab’s primary reference tool for evaluating Tier 3 verifiability.
Open research
Research agenda and open questions
Our research agenda focuses on open questions where the standard’s specifications require deeper formal analysis and empirical validation.
High-impact research projects
P01 · C8 Verifiability Tiers
A trust calculus for attestation tiers
Formally computing residual trust sets from system descriptions to evaluate whether ordinal verifiability tiers hold across disparate architectures.
P02 · C4 Authorization / C7 Evidence
From message authorization to effect binding
Establishing mathematical guarantees for when a cryptographically signed capability bound to a request strictly enforces the physical action an endpoint performs.
P05 · C5 Identity
Accountable but unlinkable agent identity
Constructing cryptographic identity schemes that allow agents to be verifiable and attributable during disputes while remaining unlinkable across relying parties during routine execution.
The six domains: ongoing work
Provenance
Extending build-time manifests to cover dynamic, runtime context composition.
Privacy
Implementing zero-knowledge commitment paths that verify access without payload leakage.
Portability
Standardizing evidence-chain continuity across multi-cloud and cross-infrastructure boundaries.
Authorization
Hardening path-aware policy evaluation at the Action Interception Gateway.
Identity
Binding dynamic agent identifiers directly to attested enclave states.
Security
Hardening hardware TEE quote verification against reference-value drift.
Who the Lab is for
Participating in the Lab
The Open Verification Lab is built for security leaders, CISOs, security engineers, auditors, researchers, and open-source infrastructure developers.
Security practitioners: join as a Founding Contributor
Security leaders and practitioners — the CISOs, engineers, and auditors answering for agent behavior — are our primary founding adopters. As a Founding Contributor, you can:
Shape the standard
Test and refine the 127 normative requirements against your operational stack.
Drive implementation checklists
Contribute non-proprietary CISO checklists, threat models, and gap-analysis frameworks.
Pilot action gateways
Deploy open action interception gateways within high-blast-radius agent workflows.
Co-author crosswalks
Map Proof-of-Control requirements directly to existing SOC 2, ISO 42001, and NIST AI RMF compliance pipelines.
Become a founding contributor →(Gmail sign-in required)
More ways to participate
Apply for a research fellowship
Propose a 90-day technical project culminating in a paper, an open tool, or an implementation demo.
Maintain on GitHub
Pick up open issues across the Lab’s repositories and submit pull requests.
Attend demo sessions
Demo sessions feature CISOs and Advanced AI Society members: their products, prototypes, market wins, and innovations.
Operating cadence
Research meeting: paper drafting, formal verification logic, and technical case studies.
Standards and tools sync: Proof-of-Control progress, implementation reviews, and maintainer pull-request triage.
GitHub pull-request review: async development and code review.
Research leadership
Jim SchwoebelLinkedIn ↗
Research Director, Open Verification Lab
Directs research at the Open Verification Lab, overseeing the Proof-of-Control standard, the open research agenda, and tool development.
Get involved
The standard is still being written. Contributors shape what it says before v1.0.
Become a founding contributor →(Gmail sign-in required)Explore repositories on GitHub →
Join the Open Verification Lab
Contribute or lead research, build tools that advance Proof-of-Control and the larger open verification category.