Ethics [air-gap]
The air-gap keeps your archive in the room.
The Gedō air-gap is the hardware setup of the Sovereign Lab workstation. Its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware is removed or disabled in firmware, it has no inbound or outbound network connection, and all processing happens on the machine itself.
Your research ethics board decides whether a study goes ahead. This page lists what the machine does and the documentation we prepare for that review.
- Wireless
- Removed or disabled in firmware
- Network
- None, inbound or outbound
- Processing
- On the workstation
- Sent to the cloud
- 0 bytes
Isolation [hardware]01 / 04
The workstation has no network connection, wired or wireless.
- Wireless
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware is removed from the board or disabled in firmware before delivery.
- Network
- The operating system listens only on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1), and outbound routing is locked.
- Telemetry
- Gedō sends no telemetry, crash reports, or diagnostic pings.
- Packages 1 and 2
- Gedō runs offline on your own laptop. The hardware changes above apply to the Sovereign Lab workstation.
Retention [storage]02 / 04
Your archive, its index, and its transcripts stay on the workstation’s drives.
- Capacity
- 20 TB of storage inside the Sovereign Lab workstation.
- Processing
- Embeddings, model weights, and interview transcripts are computed and kept on the machine.
- Retention period
- Your ethics protocol sets how long material is kept. We write that period into the retention documentation.
- Encryption
- The Sovereign Lab workstation’s drives are fully encrypted.
- Deletion
- When the retention period or your contract ends, we erase the drives cryptographically to NIST SP 800-88, then return them to you or destroy them. You receive a signed certificate of sanitization and a deletion log for each project.
- Commissioning
- With full assembly, we gather your published catalog before delivery. The retention documentation records how we handled those files.
Review [documentation]03 / 04
We prepare the air-gap and retention documentation your REB asks for.
- Frameworks
- TCPS 2 (2022), Chapter 5, Articles 5.3 and 5.4, for Canadian REBs. 45 CFR 46 for US IRBs.
- Documents
- Sovereign Lab: a vendor attestation signed by Phule’s Armada. Packages 1 and 2: self-serve documentation.
- Grants
- For SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR, and NIH applications, we write an addendum describing the machine’s isolation.
- Decision
- Your board makes it. The documentation describes the machine; it does not approve a study.
Access [people]04 / 04
You decide who holds a seat.
- Seats
- Packages 1 and 2: one personal seat. Sovereign Lab: five graduate student seats, each a keyboard and screen cabled to the workstation.
- Accounts
- You create each student’s account on the workstation and close it when they leave.
- Supervision
- The Sovereign Lab keeps a supervisory audit log of the student seats.
- Location
- The workstation sits in your office.
- Phule’s Armada
- We install the Sovereign Lab in person and run two training workshops. With no network connection, we have no remote access after that.