A public research notebook on privacy, applied cryptography and resilient systems.
Koch Laboratory is a public research notebook on privacy, applied cryptography and resilient systems: from metadata-resistant communication and low-power mesh networks, through the cryptography of time and conditional access, evidence-grade integrity of documents and records, and steganography over an owned generative channel, to structure-first compression. A separate line runs through directions whose object of measurement is measurement itself: cognitive screening on consumer EEG, machine forecasts with measured own fallibility, and content moderation without storing content. It documents reasoning and results — not products, and not promises.
Not research on a model — the classifier is off-the-shelf and says so — but on the regime it runs in: zero retention, a score instead of a verdict, fail-closed under outage, and a refuted hypothesis about reactive moderation as a cheaper substitute for scanning. Includes what has not been measured.
Six directions on a time service whose statement is meant to hold for someone who trusts neither us nor our server: a zone-free unit, a clock that ticks without asking the server and publishes its own error, a weekly Merkle log, anchoring in a bank transfer reference beside Bitcoin, a draw nobody can steer, and proof of co-stamping a moment without identity.
Seven directions on records of research time whose credibility must not rest on the good will of their author: immutability with storno instead of editing, two dates, anchors that corroborate rather than measure, proof surviving the loss of the system, evidence without disclosing content, and records that cut their own hours.
A concept-phase program on machine forecasts whose first measured object is their own fallibility: calibration without model self-assessment, resolvability under not-at-random missing ground truth, mechanisms over events and fail-closed self-verification — with the entire construction withheld.
Six directions around cognitive-aging screening on consumer EEG: in-browser event marking, ERP and inter-subject correlation against age norms, remote hyperscanning of dyads, objective pharmaco-EEG endpoints, the evidential value of a record against the right to erasure, and comparability of data across device updates — with the status of each direction stated openly.
A compression research line running since 2021, negatives published first: a measured 56% expansion on high-entropy data, an abandoned degenerate variant, and the entropy boundary as a scoping result.
Compliance on ciphertexts and hashes alone: multi-source time proofs, a tamper-evident audit chain and replacement scanning under end-to-end encryption — including a published negative result on server-side antivirus.
Five directions around a digital vault that needs no guard: 2-of-3 trust splitting, multi-factor recovery, and the boundary between attesting the past and enforcing the future — with documented redesigns.
Four directions where steganographic security reduces to sampler fidelity rather than an arms race with detectors — including a published negative result on classical image steganography.
Six directions in low-power sensor networks that keep working when the internet and mains power are gone.
Seven research directions in applied cryptography for a messenger whose relay is deaf — including a published negative result.