Modern authentication already answers who you are, quickly and well. The slow, fragile part is deciding what you may do. AZT moves that decision onto a trust anchor the requesting software cannot subvert, and signs a receipt either way.
Once software authenticates, it is treated as authorized. A compromised application, a coerced operator, or a subverted AI holding valid credentials acts within that authority while appearing fully legitimate. The access decision is made inside the same software environment that issues the request.
AZT moves authorization outside the host. A policy decision point runs inside a formally verified separation microkernel, roughly 10 kLOC of trusted computing base with machine-checked isolation proofs, measured and attested by a FIPS 140-3-class programmable secure element.
Every grant and every denial produces a signed, tamper-evident receipt, hash-chained into an append-only evidence ledger. You get the immutability and independent verifiability associated with blockchains, with no consensus-liveness dependency.
Per-flow attested channel tokens are enforced from cache: millisecond data tempo, no round-trip in the hot path. The system works fully disconnected, where cloud-tethered Zero Trust products fail or fail closed.
Five steps, none of which trust the software that asked.
Policy evaluation isolated in a formally verified microkernel, measured by a secure element. Independent of the OS, the application, and the network.
Per-compartment cryptographic keys with enforcement points guarding each compartment. Compromise of one grants nothing about the next.
Append-only, hash-chained, independently verifiable. Auditable after the fact without trusting the operator, the vendor, or us.
Analytics emit signed risk signals that drive pre-authorized, bounded adaptation. They advise; they never grant.
Deploy as a hypervisor beneath an existing OS, or as an inline bump-in-the-wire enforcement appliance in front of systems that cannot change.
Signature and key-establishment paths track FIPS 203/204/205 and NSA CNSA 2.0 so evidence stays verifiable for the life of the record.
The building blocks are mature and independently validated; our contribution is the integration. Formal proofs cover specific, stated configurations, not everything we ship. Where an assurance has limits, we will tell you where they are.
The DoD Zero Trust mandate assumes connectivity that contested environments do not offer. AZT makes and proves access decisions with no cloud tether, on disconnected, degraded, intermittent, and limited links.
Digital-asset custody already runs on verify-then-release governance, and regulators already expect hardware-rooted controls. AZT gives every release a hardware-attested decision and an independently verifiable receipt.
As enterprises delegate authority to agentic software, the question becomes what an agent may do, provably, on systems that matter.
AI may propose; the trust boundary decides.
Atomic Authority Inc is a Delaware corporation based in Vancouver, Washington, founded on a simple observation: the access decision should not live inside the software that asks for it.
Ph.D. in data science and graph database systems (UC Santa Barbara). Five years at NASA JPL as lead developer of a transactional, version-controlled graph DBMS for spacecraft systems engineering. Chief engineer of a fielded non-custodial privacy router built on TEEs, threshold ECDSA, and zero-knowledge proofs; security researcher and technical advisor on systems securing over $1B in digital assets. Author of constant-time cryptographic implementations and 20+ peer-reviewed publications.
If your organization releases value, grants access, or delegates authority to software, we would like to compare notes.