Project CHRONOS: A Fully Homomorphic Ephemeral AI Agent with Provable Self Termination and Remote Verifiability
We present CHRONOS, the first autonomous AI agent that simultaneously achieves plaintextblindness (all data is processed under fully homomorphic encryption without ever beingexposed), cryptographically enforced time bound existence (the agent’s own decryption key islocked behind a publicly verifiable proof of sequential work, rendering it inaccessible until aprecise future moment), and remote verifiability of self destruction (a zero knowledge proofcertifies that the key material has been irreversibly destroyed after mission completion). Theagent’s operational lifespan is governed by a “cryptographic fuse” constructed from a proof ofsequential work (PoSW) whose computation time accurately matches the intended missionduration. A drand decentralized randomness beacon serves as a trusted time oracle to trigger thefinal key shredding. Crucially, the erasure proof is a non interactive zero knowledge argument(SNARK) that proves the correct execution of the entire self destruction sequence—including thePoSW solution, decryption of the private key, and subsequent memory zeroization—enablingany third party to cryptographically verify the agent’s annihilation without trusting the agent orits hardware. We provide a complete system architecture, a formal security model with gamebased definitions and reductions to standard assumptions, and a proof of concept implementationusing Zama’s TFHE rs for encrypted inference, a Cohen Pietrzak PoSW implementation, and aGroth16 SNARK. Our benchmarks indicate that FHE inference on a small neural network (50 Kparameters) completes in seconds, the PoSW background thread consumes negligible resources,and the erasure proof can be generated and verified in under three seconds. CHRONOSrepresents a fundamental advance in secure, disposable AI agents, with immediate applications indefense, intelligence, and high privacy environments.