A public research notebook on privacy, applied cryptography and resilient systems.
Confirmed as research and development
In October 2026 Germany’s Bescheinigungsstelle Forschungszulage (BSFZ) confirmed nine projects of this laboratory as research and development under the Research Allowance Act (FZulG):
The seal attests that this is research — not that any product is secure, and not a grant. The BSFZ assessed written descriptions of the projects; it has no access to code, data or 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.
How to read this
Each direction states a problem, the state of the art and a falsifiable result with boundary conditions.
Negative results are published, not hidden. A refuted hypothesis is the strongest evidence that real technical uncertainty existed.
Directions with patent potential publish the problem and the result, not the construction.
Everything here is a selected, delayed extract of a private, dated laboratory notebook.
What this is not
Not a product page — product claims live on the product sites, in the present tense.
Not marketing. You will not find “innovative”, “breakthrough” or “revolutionary” here; a technical reviewer reads those as an absence of substance.
Continues the entry of 2026-07-10, now naming the product. From July to September 2026 Ygoow’s security claims were turned into two-stage cards — criteria and predictions first, measurement after — on the target phone or in simulation: 37 cards (24 with the registration committed before the run), 199 ledger predictions of which 36 missed, eight published claims overturned and withdrawn, and corrections to statements of the July entry that no longer hold. Constructions withheld; traffic results come from a model, not from captured Tor traffic.
Two studies from the forecasting programme, each settled by its own measurement: whether a system running without supervision learns rather than rationalises — tested on questions resolved after its model’s training cut-off, with safeguards that stop output instead of attaching a warning — and how lowering a model’s numerical precision affects the factual fidelity of statements derived from source documents. Neither has a result yet; the criteria are published before any result, and the entry corrects the earlier statement that implementation had not started.
Continues and corrects the entry of 20 August 2026, now under the name Sigelith. A signing key shared with a development mirror refuted the assumption that a valid signature identifies our roots, so trust moved to a log anyone can download and recompute (RFC 9162) and to copies and anchors held by others; plus per-entry time brackets from Bitcoin and a bank instead of our clock, backups that carry their own evidence, and a review of what a client showed as verified — each with its boundaries.
A continuation of the neuro entry: before any real recording, the analysis chain was tested on synthetic data with known ground truth and negative controls. Negative results on stimulus and signal, four methodological audit findings and their corrections, a norm restricted to amplitudes — and corrections to the entry of 2026-08-12, including a withdrawn intended-purpose sentence.
Two benchmarks on a disclosed corpus continue the entry of 2026-07-14, negatives first: XOR dependency coding refuted in 1D and 2D, a historical codec version that could not decode its own output, and a positive that did not carry over to real scans — leaving born-digital rasters with bit-exact repetition as the only niche. With corrections to the earlier entry.
Continues the entry of 2026-07-14: enforcing the future now exists for individual entries — through an external time quorum rather than a time-lock puzzle, with its trust boundaries stated — the place condition has moved from application policy into the key, and the negative results since July are published together with corrections to statements of the July entry that no longer hold.
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.
