Building the PQ1: The first verifiable post quantum hardware wallet

Start at the silicon and work up. The chip is trustworthy only if you can see what is on it, which the factory usually makes impossible, sealing the device before it ships and closing the one window an owner had. The firmware is trustworthy only if you can rebuild it yourself and confirm the device is running that build, which means the device has to report on itself in a way it has no ability to falsify. The application is trustworthy only if someone has checked that it does what it claims, against the code that actually executes rather than a description of it. Three links, three different techniques, and three ways of failing quietly. Reproducible builds drift. A tamper alarm that fires wrongly teaches people to ignore it. And a proof can be perfect in form and empty in content. The talk walks through the techniques we used building the PQ1: what held, what broke, and how to judge a verifiability claim you did not build yourself.

Speakers: Nicola Ceornea, Markus Haas

Track: Open & Verifiable Stack