Truth,by design.
Investigators collect the evidence. Whether it holds up depends on proving it wasn’t altered, and today that’s almost always a person’s word, not a technical record. Kairos is the cryptographic architecture designed to close that gap: evidence bound to the moment of capture, verifiable independent of Kairos. CAPTURE, CME, and CMIS are an internal MVP in active build today.
Where evidence fails by domain
Documented evidentiary failures across four domains, each costing real convictions, delayed accountability, or years of contested proceedings. Some trace directly to a capture-integrity gap the design below is built to close; others involve deliberate destruction or institutional failure that no signing system alone resolves. The distinction matters, and each case is described on its own terms.
Caesar Files — Syria
53,275 photographs documenting torture in Assad detention facilities, transferred with a custody record based entirely on human testimony rather than technical verification. Defense challenged authenticity in German and French proceedings throughout; convictions in Koblenz (2021–22) relied on witness testimony to establish what a technical record did not. An illustration of the capture-and-transfer gap a cryptographic custody log is designed to address.Ukraine — ongoing conflict documentation
Over 100 organizations collecting digital evidence with incompatible systems and no common integrity standard. Eurojust (2023) and the HRMMU publicly flagged that existing frameworks are inadequate for ICC prosecution. A gap of the kind a shared cryptographic standard is designed to close, though adoption across 100+ independent organizations is itself a significant undertaking, not a software feature.Gaza — ICC preliminary examination
The 2024 arrest warrant applications relied on open-source material collected across dozens of organizations with no unified custody framework, meaning long-term authenticity cannot currently be independently, cryptographically verified.Brazil — Operation Car Wash / Lula acquittal
The largest corruption investigation in Latin American history. The Brazilian Supreme Court annulled convictions of former President Lula in 2021 primarily on judicial-impartiality grounds; evidence-handling concerns, including around communications intercepts, were also raised during the proceedings. A mixed case: part judicial process, part evidentiary handling, not a pure custody-integrity failure.South Africa — Zondo State Capture Commission
The Commission (2018–2022) found the evidentiary record weakened by deliberate deletion and modification of government digital records by state actors with legitimate system access: a custodian-side destruction problem. A tamper-evident access and chain-of-custody log is designed to make this kind of deletion detectable after the fact; it would not, on its own, have prevented a custodian from destroying records in the first place.Mexico — enforced disappearances
Over 100,000 documented enforced disappearances since 2006 (OHCHR 2023). Digital evidence from citizen investigators is routinely challenged for lack of forensic authentication, a capture-authentication gap. Separately, official records are in some cases destroyed by state actors, which is a deliberate-destruction problem that authentication of citizen-collected evidence does not address.India — Bhima Koregaon planted evidence
Arsenal Consulting found malware was used to plant fabricated incriminating documents on 16 activists’ computers (2018–2021), which were then accepted by prosecutors without independent cryptographic authentication. An authentication-at-capture standard is designed to make the class of problem, evidence with no genuine chain back to an identified collector, visible; it does not address device compromise that occurs before or outside any collection event.UK — Post Office Horizon scandal
Faulty output from the Horizon accounting system led to the wrongful prosecution of 736 sub-postmasters (1999–2015), the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. This was fundamentally a software-reliability and institutional-conduct failure (the Post Office asserted system accuracy that was false) rather than a field-capture custody gap; it illustrates why independent verifiability of any evidence-generating system matters, a broader problem than capture-time signing alone solves.US — FBI forensic lab misconduct
A DOJ review (2015) found FBI examiners gave flawed hair-comparison testimony in at least 268 criminal cases over two decades, a methodology and oversight failure. The review also noted the absence of verifiable audit trails for evidence handling and testing records as a compounding factor; cryptographic logging is designed to address that compounding factor, not the underlying analytical error itself.Every block designed to link cryptographically to the last
This is the architecture Kairos is designing, engineered so tampering at any point breaks the entire chain and the break is detectable at any future moment, including years later in court. Click each block to explore the design.
Quantum decryption and AI forgery require separate mitigations
These are not variations of the same problem. They operate on different timelines, exploit different vulnerabilities, and demand different cryptographic responses, which is why Kairos is designed to address both from the outset, not bolt one on later.
Adversaries are collecting encrypted evidence today for future quantum decryption
State-level adversaries have been documented collecting encrypted digital evidence under a “harvest now, decrypt later” strategy. Intelligence community consensus places the point at which large-scale quantum decryption becomes practical at roughly 2030–2035, a projection, not a certainty. Evidence currently under collection in active ICC investigations (Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar) may still be in proceedings by then, which is the practical reason for designing with post-quantum algorithms now rather than waiting. Planned mitigation: ML-DSA-65 hybrid signing alongside Ed25519 at the moment of capture, before the file enters any transmission channel.Authentic evidence challenged as AI-generated in court
A structurally separate attack: defense counsel challenges authentic evidence as AI-generated because no cryptographic timestamp predating the relevant generative capability exists. This is not a decryption problem. It is a provenance problem. A 2024 Content Authenticity Initiative study found 96% of conflict-zone digital images carry no verifiable provenance metadata. A Pakistani court in 2024 was unable to resolve whether audio evidence was AI-generated for precisely this reason. Planned mitigation: RFC 3161 trusted timestamp and PQ signature at capture, predating any generative model’s capability to have produced the file.Both threats converging in active conflict documentation
Russian information operations have deployed AI-synthesized footage alongside systematic encryption of real communications, exploiting both vulnerabilities simultaneously. Ukrainian prosecutors face the challenge of authenticating genuine atrocity documentation against deliberate synthetic confusion, while that same documentation is being collected without cryptographic signing standards that would resolve either challenge.Evidence that survives the quantum transition
A war crimes prosecution can take 20 years. Evidence encrypted with classical algorithms today may not survive that window intact. Kairos’s cryptographic design is built around the NIST post-quantum standards finalized in August 2024, so evidence collected now doesn’t need to be re-secured later. The platform itself is an internal MVP in active build; the hybrid post-quantum layer below is designed and flag-gated, not yet the default.
Internal MVP
CAPTURE, CME, and CMIS are in active internal development, grounded in the team’s direct operational experience in mass grave documentation, battlefield forensic exploitation, and conflict-zone evidence collection across 30 countries, applying Berkeley Protocol methodology to shape the platform’s design requirements.
Evidence platform (SaaS)
A planned standalone system for post-quantum cryptographic signing, chain-of-custody logging, and court-ready package generation, intended for law enforcement, military justice, human rights investigators, and international tribunal practitioners. Engineering build is underway now, targeting external availability in Q1 2027, contingent on seed funding. Internal MVP status; see Post-Quantum Cryptography and How It Works above for the design.
Institutional integration
Once the SaaS platform is built and validated, the roadmap calls for integration with systems investigative units already use: Cellebrite, DEMS, Axon body camera evidence, and SIEM overlays for classified network environments, along with a pathway toward DoD ATO/STIG authorization. This phase follows platform launch; none of these integrations or authorizations exist yet.
Contact
Kairos is in active internal MVP development and pre-seed fundraising, in buyer validation today, targeting a Q1 2027 external platform launch. If you evaluate digital evidence for a living, or you’re backing what comes after, we want the conversation now, while it can still shape what we build.