Quantum-Resistant Cybersecurity for Enterprise & Critical Infrastructure
Quantum-Resistant Cybersecurity for Enterprise & Critical Infrastructure
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[Status: Active R&D / Under Development]
CipherHorse transforms hardened, STIG- and FIPS-enabled Linux distributions into a cryptographically enforced, hardware-attested security-by-compartmentalization model. It isolates applications and system services into separate, lightweight sandboxes and MicroVMs, to protect your most sensitive assets in high-risk, zero-trust environments.
[Status: Active R&D / Under Development]
CipherHorse transforms hardened, STIG- and FIPS-enabled Linux distributions into a cryptographically enforced, hardware-attested security-by-compartmentalization model. It isolates applications and system services into separate, lightweight sandboxes and MicroVMs, to protect your most sensitive assets in high-risk, zero-trust environments.
Engineered to deliver Level 5-equivalent (256-bit symmetric) quantum-resistant strength across multi-persona profiles, enforcing strict separation of critical data.
Engineered to deliver Level 5-equivalent (256-bit symmetric) quantum-resistant strength across multi-persona profiles, enforcing strict separation of critical data.
Informed by and aligned with frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-53/193, FIPS 140-3, CNSA 2.0, and DISA STIG.
Informed by and aligned with frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-53/193, FIPS 140-3, CNSA 2.0, and DISA STIG.
Developed by OneCor10
Developed by OneCor10
Assume Breach. Assume Physical Compromise.
In high-risk environments, traditional perimeter defenses are insufficient. Advanced adversaries now possess the capabilities for deep traffic analysis, physical device tampering, and long-term cryptographic harvesting.
CipherHorse’s architecture is built for the worst-case scenario. We assume the network is hostile, the host operating system is compromised, and the physical hardware will inevitably fall into adversarial hands for offline brute-force or future quantum decryption.
What CipherHorse Is:
CipherHorse is a security platform for enterprise Linux systems (RHEL, Rocky, Alma, Ubuntu Pro) that introduces compartmentalized, zero-trust computing. Drawing inspiration from systems like Qubes OS, it aligns with rigorous security frameworks such as FIPS 140-3 and DISA STIG. (read more)
Moving beyond foundational system hardening, CipherHorse extends into secure software development and AI-assisted engineering workflows. This includes CipherHorse Code: Parametric AI Assist, a dependency-aware development environment designed to enable AI-assisted software engineering within a controlled, compartmentalized architecture.
The platform integrates:
Zero-trust networking for secure, identity-bound communication.
Compartmentalized MicroVM-based workloads on an immutable base system, enforcing persona-based isolation (e.g., untrusted, work, confidential).
Continuous, AI-driven security validation through internal red-teaming workflows.
Endpoint and peripheral isolation utilizing hardware-mediated controls and application-layer firewalls.
Moving Target Defense (MTD) mechanisms with ephemeral identities and rotating system states.
Optional host OS demotion into a controlled, immutable virtual environment.
A structured, dependency-aware AI environment for secure software development.
CipherHorse is built on a compartmentalized architecture where all critical components—including AI workloads—operate within strictly isolated environments to minimize blast radius and enforce high-assurance boundaries
Who It’s For:
CipherHorse is designed for organizations that require high-assurance security in regulated, high-risk, or sensitive environments, including: (read more)
Critical infrastructure operators.
Regulated enterprises (e.g., finance, energy, healthcare, telecommunications).
Security-focused organizations with strict zero-trust or high-compliance mandates.
Teams operating in high-risk or adversarial digital environments.
DevSecOps and platform engineering teams building or deploying AI-assisted and mission-critical systems.
How It Works:
How It Works:
CipherHorse installs alongside an existing enterprise Linux system and restructures it into a compartmentalized, zero-trust environment. (read more)
Host Isolation: The host system is isolated by default, with network access restricted through a system-level kill switch.
Dedicated Domains: All networking and peripherals are handled through secured, dedicated compartments to prevent direct exposure of the host environment.
Centralized Control Plane: Administrators manage users, policies, and system configurations through a unified management interface.
Persona-Based Provisioning: Users are provisioned with isolated MicroVM environments, utilizing ephemeral identities and tightly scoped credentials.
Encrypted Execution & Storage: Workloads execute inside isolated compartments, communicating only through explicitly controlled, encrypted channels. Storage is protected via network-bound encryption, ensuring data remains inaccessible outside authorized contexts.
Cryptographic Verification: All system updates, access events, and operational actions are cryptographically verified to enforce integrity and traceability.
Continuous Security Validation
CipherHorse includes an integrated, compartmentalized security validation layer. Autonomous testing agents—either native to the platform or user-supplied—operate within isolated MicroVM environments to continuously evaluate access controls, segmentation policies, and system boundaries. These agents simulate adversarial behavior under strict containment, ensuring that validation activities cannot impact the host system or other workloads.
AI-Assisted Development Integration:
Developers operate within isolated MicroVM environments using CipherHorse Code, a dependency-aware development system. AI models are accessed through secure, policy-controlled channels, with only minimal, context-specific data exposed. All AI-generated code is validated, dependency-checked, and cryptographically signed before integration, ensuring consistency, traceability, and strict supply chain integrity.
Why It Matters:
Why It Matters:
CipherHorse enables a “clean-room” computing model designed to preserve system integrity even under active compromise. (read more)
Containment & Blast Radius: Compromised hosts can be isolated and contained without exposing the broader system. Workloads operate in independent compartments, preventing lateral movement.
Continuous Validation: Controlled, AI-driven security validation actively verifies that access controls and segmentation policies are functioning as intended.
Moving Target Defense (MTD): Dynamic mechanisms reduce persistent attack surfaces over time, frustrating adversarial dwell time.
High-Assurance Auditability: Administrators retain full control and traceability, aligned with established hardening baselines such as DISA STIG.
The result is a system that assumes breach—and is engineered to remain resilient.
CipherHorse extends this model directly into software engineering. With CipherHorse Code, organizations can adopt AI-assisted development within a controlled environment, minimizing the exposure of sensitive source code and enforcing strict dependency integrity. This maintains AI-assisted workflows as deterministic, auditable, and secure.
This approach delivers quantum-resistant security to mitigate long-horizon cryptographic risks, fortifying the protection of critical digital infrastructure and high-assurance enterprise systems.
Core Capabilities
Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Mesh (FIPS 140-3).
Mechanism: Implements quantum-resilient key establishment using a dynamic pre-shared key (PSK) architecture combined with deterministic state evolution based on HMAC-SHA-512. This enables continuous key rotation without reliance on repeated asymmetric negotiation. Data-in-transit is protected using AES-256-GCM within a memory-safe cryptographic engine. Legacy and non-compliant algorithms are excluded from core pathways by design.
Effect: Delivers scalable, high-strength encrypted communication channels with continuous key rotation and minimal handshake overhead. The architecture supports multiple concurrent secure tunnels, maintains strong forward secrecy properties, and significantly reduces reliance on heavyweight certificate-based PKI infrastructures.
Constraint: No backward compatibility with legacy protocols; requires secure provisioning and lifecycle management of keying material. Strict key zeroization and forward-state isolation enforce the destruction of session state upon termination, meaning historical data is structurally isolated from previous session states to prevent decryption via historical key recovery.
Traffic Obfuscation.
Mechanism: Implements deterministic traffic protection over encrypted transport channels to reduce the exposure of communication metadata. The system combines symmetric authenticated encryption with synthetic traffic generation to obscure observable patterns. Cryptographic chaffing introduces decoy-encrypted traffic alongside legitimate sessions, distorting statistical analysis and traffic fingerprinting attempts. Cryptographic state evolves per sequence to limit key reuse and strengthen forward-state isolation.
Effect: Degrades the effectiveness of traffic analysis and deep packet inspection by obscuring communication patterns and introducing controlled background activity. This limits the exposure of metadata such as timing, volume, and session structure in high-risk network environments.
Constraint: Introduces additional bandwidth and processing overhead due to synthetic traffic generation and continuous encryption, requiring appropriate network capacity and performance planning.
Structurally Isolated Networking & Hardware Firewalls.
Mechanism: Upon boot, the host system establishes strict network and peripheral isolation via a policy-controlled eBPF routing layer that governs packet flow before it reaches conventional networking paths. Workloads and peripheral handlers execute within isolated MicroVM environments, bypassing shared virtual switches entirely. Communication occurs exclusively through 1:1 hardware micro-firewalls and cryptographically bound, persona-specific ZTNA tunnels. Outbound data transfers require explicit administrative approval.
Effect: This architecture is designed to severely restrict shared network pathways, and reduces exposure between workloads and the host system. Each execution environment is contained within a defined isolation boundary, restricting lateral movement across the system and mitigating escalation paths toward the host kernel. Hardware-level attack vectors, including malicious peripheral firmware and direct memory access (DMA)-based attacks, are confined within isolated execution domains. Unauthorized command-and-control (C2) or exfiltration attempts are structurally impeded by the strict egress rules.
Constraint: The security model depends on the integrity of underlying hardware virtualization guarantees (e.g., VT-d/IOMMU) and assumes the absence of low-level CPU or hypervisor vulnerabilities. Routing through additional abstraction layers introduces measurable but controlled performance overhead compared to bare-metal execution. A compromised workload may still interact with authorized remote nodes defined by its persona, relying on the integrity of those remote ZTNA endpoints.
Moving Target Defense (MTD).
Mechanism: Upon session termination, the proprietary "Double Roll" mechanism executes a deterministic rotation of cryptographic keys, ephemeral users, machine identities, and virtual storage locations, subsequently obfuscating the underlying physical storage structures.
Effect: Enforces strict "cryptographic amnesia" to eliminate persistent attack surfaces. By continuously mutating these access paths and identities, the environment structurally disrupts an adversary's ability to establish a remote network foothold or perform historical forensics on physically captured hardware. This structurally disrupts the tracking of access patterns or the targeting of specific individuals across both logical and physical vectors, all while maintaining DISA STIG auditability.
Constraint: Cryptographic amnesia is fundamentally a temporal defense. If a compartment is compromised mid-execution, an adversary can still view or manipulate the decrypted payload data actively open within that isolated session prior to the termination trigger. Additionally, this MTD mechanism is not currently designed to obfuscate or roll the physical RF signatures of the underlying transport hardware.
Continuous Automated Red-Teaming (CART).
Mechanism: Integrates CipherHorse AI, an autonomous, multi-agent penetration testing framework that operates safely within the established cryptographic mesh. It continuously maps, tests, and evaluates internal Access Control Lists (ACLs) and zero-trust policies independently, without requiring human oversight.
Effect: Replaces point-in-time compliance checks with continuous security validation. It actively verifies system defenses and compartmentalization integrity from within, identifying misconfigurations or policy drifts to reduce the window of potential adversarial exploitation.
Constraint: Security validation is restricted to the logical policies, ACLs, and network boundaries exposed to the agent's specific execution domain. The agents operate under strict containment and cannot assess out-of-band hardware vulnerabilities or physical-layer security.
[Under Development]
CipherHorse AI: Your Built-In Autonomous Red Team
To continuously validate and stress-test our quantum-resistant defenses under realistic adversarial conditions, CipherHorse includes a native, autonomous multi-agent red-teaming system. The platform also provides a modular harness for organizations to deploy their own proprietary AI models for ongoing adversarial security validation.
Advanced Security Testing, Safely Contained
CipherHorse AI is engineered to think and act like a sophisticated human adversary, with key advantages:
Based on Peer-Reviewed Research: CipherHorse AI integrates and adapts multi-agent autonomous red-teaming research developed by Stanford Trinity, including the ARTEMIS framework, and extends it for deployment in high-assurance, hardware-attested environments.
In an independent 2025 evaluation (arXiv:2512.09882), ARTEMIS was tested head-to-head against 10 professional penetration testers on a live enterprise network of ~8,000 hosts. It placed 2nd overall, discovered 9 valid vulnerabilities with an 82% valid submission rate, and outperformed 9 out of 10 human participants.
"Assumed Breach" Specialist: Operating from inside the cryptographic mesh, our multi-agent AI simulates an active internal compromise. Moving beyond traditional static scanning, it executes intelligent, multi-step exploit scenarios, relentlessly testing Access Control Lists (ACLs) and validating zero-trust policies 24/7.
Bring Your Own Agent (BYOA): While CipherHorse includes a powerful native red-teaming AI, the architecture operates as an entirely modular harness. Organizations can seamlessly inject their own proprietary multi-agent systems or advanced security models into the mesh to safely evaluate their capabilities in a live environment.
Data Privacy & Perimeter-Bound Execution: Unlike commercial AI tools that risk exposing sensitive network topology to public APIs, the CipherHorse AI harness operates entirely within the FIPS-enabled zero-trust perimeter. It interfaces securely with local or private cloud hosted models inside regulated, high-assurance environments.
Hardware-Enforced Containment: All red-teaming agents—whether native to CipherHorse AI or user-supplied—are executed within dedicated, hardware-attested MicroVM compartments
These compartments are built from minimal, hardened OS templates aligned with NIST SP 800-53, FIPS 140-3, and STIG baselines. They enforce strict mandatory access controls to maintain a deliberately reduced attack surface.
This architecture establishes a tightly constrained blast radius, engineered to keep even highly capable offensive agents structurally isolated from the host system and other workloads. The result is practical, high-assurance containment suitable for critical infrastructure and regulated enterprise deployments.
Overview
Overview
Compartmented Architecture:
The Lead-Mare & The Herd
CipherHorse abandons the vulnerable, monolithic operating system model. Instead, it deploys as an immutable, high-assurance supervisor that dynamically manages highly restricted, isolated workloads. We operate on the principle of Strict Blast Radius Containment.
The Lead-Mare (The Immutable Supervisor):
The central nervous system of the platform. Operating under strict, Seccomp-enforced system-call filtering, the Lead-Mare acts as the cryptographic gateway. It natively hosts the Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) control plane, hardware-level eBPF killswitches, ephemeral identity generation, and an advanced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) firewall. It controls the hardware, but executes no user applications.
The Herd-Members (Hardware-Attested Compartments):
Mission-critical applications are stripped of standard OS privileges and executed inside fully isolated MicroVMs or strictly bound rootless namespaces.
Out-of-the-Box Workloads: Includes an eBPF Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Secure Git with CNSA 2.0 commit signing, automated SBOM supply-chain validation, Low-Latency 4K RDP, our "Twin-Engine" Hardened PostgreSQL databases, and CipherHorse AI (our autonomous, hardware-caged penetration tester).
Strategic Use Case: Secure Agentic AI Evaluation
As AI evolves from passive chat models to autonomous agents, traditional container-based evaluation harnesses are no longer safe. Agentic red-teaming requires executing potentially malicious tool-use in a secure sandbox.
OneCor10 is currently prototyping the CipherHorse AI Evaluation Harness. By integrating industry-standard evaluation frameworks (such as UK AISI Inspect or other proprietary tools) with our hardware-attested MicroAppVMs, we aim to provide a hardware-attested "Blast Radius Containment Sandbox." This entire system operates within a private, CNSA 2.0 compliant, peer-to-peer mesh network, giving teams the security of a logically air-gapped environment.
Evaluators can test untrusted, unaligned frontier AI agents in regulated Multi-Persona environments. Even if an AI agent executes a zero-day breakout payload, it is designed to be trapped inside a network-less, eBPF-shielded micro-environment—fully protecting the host infrastructure and preventing model exfiltration via our Moving Target Defense (MTD) rolling vaults.
This same high-assurance harness is used to safely contain our own native red-teaming agent, CipherHorse AI.
[Under Development]
CipherHorse Code: Parametric AI Assist
[Under Development]
CipherHorse Code: Parametric AI Assist
High-Assurance Software Engineering for high-assurance environments.
Standard AI coding assistants introduce significant Operational Security (OPSEC) risks within defense and enterprise environments. Sensitive source code is often transmitted to external APIs, and large-scale code generation can produce inconsistent or incomplete dependency handling across complex systems.
CipherHorse Code applies the rigor of aerospace and parametric CAD engineering to software development. It introduces a deterministic, dependency-aware development model designed specifically for AI-assisted workflows.
Instead of exposing entire repositories to a Large Language Model (LLM), CipherHorse Code constructs a structured Parametric Model Tree—a dependency graph where code elements are explicitly linked through parent-child relationships, enabling controlled and predictable change propagation.
Core Capabilities of CipherHorse Code:
Core Capabilities of CipherHorse Code:
Deterministic Dependency Tracking
Code structures are explicitly linked within a structured dependency graph. When an AI agent modifies a function or module, all downstream impacts are precisely identified and surfaced, reducing the risk of inconsistent or incomplete updates.Contextual Data Minimization
Eliminates reliance on large context windows. Only the minimal set of relevant code and dependency constraints are provided to the AI, improving accuracy while reducing exposure of sensitive logic.
Secure AI Execution Path
Developer endpoints interact exclusively with air-gapped, on-premises, or authorized cloud-hosted LLM environments. All inference traffic is routed through the CipherHorse CNSA 2.0 ZTNA mesh, cryptographically enforcing data localization and preventing external data leakage.Cryptographic Chain of Custody
Fully integrated with the CipherHorse Secure Git Herd-Member. All AI-assisted modifications are validated, SBOM-scanned, and committed with enforced CNSA 2.0 cryptographic signing.
Operational Impact
Operational Impact
CipherHorse Code enables software teams to leverage AI-assisted development at scale, while maintaining the deterministic control, traceability, and security required for mission-critical systems.
Engineered for Critical Infrastructure and Enterprise Security:
CipherHorse was purpose-built from the ground up with the intent to strictly adhere to DISA STIG (Defense Information Systems Agency Security Technical Implementation Guide) and FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards).
But baseline compliance is not enough for hostile network conditions. We engineered our architecture to natively enforce CNSA 2.0 (Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite), directly addressing the stringent quantum-resistant mandates required by high-assurance environments—including those seen across regulated sectors such as finance, energy, and telecommunications.
This high-assurance approach extends quantum-resistant resilience beyond government applications, directly protecting enterprises, critical infrastructure, and other high-value organizations from the long-term threats posed by sophisticated adversaries.
Engineered to meet the rigorous constraints of high-risk operational environments:
Autonomous Red-Teaming: Conduct continuous, AI-driven penetration testing and vulnerability mapping. Security testing agents operate exclusively inside hardware-attested MicroVMs, providing structural isolation from the host kernel while adhering to DISA STIG constraints.
Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE): Pre-boot cryptographic unlocking via quantum-resistant secure tunnels.
Hollow Host: The underlying host system is hollowed out and restricted, minimizing the physical attack surface.
Host OS Demotion: For additional security, an advanced option allows the main OS to be fully demoted into an immutable, virtualized environment.
Multi-Persona Isolation: Strict, hardware-enforced partitioned workflows for role-based access control.
Disposable Ephemeral AppVMs: Task-specific, high-integrity isolation designed to support full DISA STIG compliance.
Air-Gapped Survivability: Designed to maintain local integrity and cryptographic verification within air-gapped environments.
CNSA 2.0 compliant Ecosystem: Establishes an end-to-end encryption environment for Email, Cloud Storage, Central Control, and Data-at-Rest.
Secure Application Delivery: Run Windows Applications via MicroAppVMs (e.g., Microsoft Office 365), on a hardened Linux foundation.
Operations & Team Leader
Operations & Team Leader
Mr. Nicolaas J. Janse van Rensburg
Founder | R&D Designer | Chief Technology Officer
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nj-jvrensburg
The work behind CipherHorse is grounded in ongoing research and development in secure systems architecture, virtualization, and applied cryptography, with a focus on level 5-equivalent (256-bit symmetric) quantum-resistant systems and zero-trust computing models.
"Just as the builders in Nehemiah carried swords while they worked, we must ensure our security tools are always at hand—balancing constant vigilance with uninterrupted productivity as we secure every step of our digital journey."
— N.J. Janse van Rensburg
Our Foundation
"But now, whoever has a purse should take it, and likewise a bag; and whoever has no sword should sell his cloak and buy one." — Luke 22:36
About OneCor10
OneCor10 is an advanced cybersecurity startup built unapologetically on Christian principles. We are engineering advanced quantum-resistant zero-trust architecture for secure distributed systems, while recognizing that human effort alone is not sufficient. Wisdom comes from above, and we operate under the truth of 1 Corinthians 3:7: “So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.”
OneCor10 was founded with a singular mission: to rethink network security from the silicon up. In an era where quantum computing threatens legacy encryption and systems are increasingly exposed to sophisticated adversaries, standard VPNs and traditional operating systems are no longer sufficient.
Currently bootstrapping as a lean, research-driven startup focused on developing advanced security architectures for high-risk and critical computing environments, OneCor10 is pioneering a “Clean-Room” approach to secure computing.
CipherHorse is currently in an Invite-Only prototyping phase. While the platform is engineered to support rigorous evaluation in enterprise and regulated sectors, our early-access pilot program is currently open to critical infrastructure and enterprise partners.
All of our resources are dedicated to backend systems architecture, cryptographic engine development, and advanced virtualization. We are committed to bringing true, hardware-attested high-assurance computing to enterprise, public-sector, and critical infrastructure environments.
[Apply for Early Access / Technical Briefing]
[Apply for Early Access / Technical Briefing]
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