Dmitri Alperovitch

Why Drones Can’t Replace Traditional Firepower My @GeopolDecanted discussion with @justin-br0nk.bsky.social about his recent provocative @rusi.bsky.social piece on this topic. We also discuss efficacy of Ukrainian F-16s, Operation SpiderWeb and much more. Watch 👇 youtu.be/ykLIH2kY1U8

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

Through this lens, the Chip Security Act or similar solutions would help accomplish the goal of identifying export control violators with minimal overhead to AI chip companies and exporters

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

In another scenario, if you have a customer that has purchased tens of thousands of AI chips which are not reporting in every month (accounting for typical chip failure rates, etc), it is also grounds for a BIS investigation of an importer

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

To mitigate against this, the exporter's webserver can measure round trip time (RTT) for packets inside the mTLS connection and then compare it to pings to the IP from which the connection is originating

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

Another way to accomplish this might to be use existing Intel Trust Authority for GPU remote attestation architecture that Intel and Nvidia have partnered on but that creates a requirement to use Intel CPUs, which may not be ideal in every case docs.trustauthority.intel.com/main/article...

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

The connection can be trivially initiated via a simple script from other parts of the environment where the AI chip is deployed, but just talk to the GPU driver for handshake initiation/client key exchange with the EXPORT_CERT. This minimizes the technical reqs for AI chips

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

So if a chip is being sold to a data center in Singapore but the connection originates from an IP address in China (or anywhere else), well, that means you might have a potential transshipment on your hands that warrants BIS investigation

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

US exporters would run mTLS webservers with public key versions of the EXPORT_CERTs loaded on them (they would get them from the chip designers) to record the IP addresses and their geolocation from where the connections are originating

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

New AI chips going forward can incorporate a new certificate with a private key (EXPORT_CERT) in their Secure Enclave (they already have other certs for secure boot/attestation). So this is a very simple task

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

CSA bill should tell BIS to rely on NIST to come up with the appropriate technical solution that is as technically simple as possible for both chip designers, exporters, and end-users

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

The most important thing about the Chip Security Act and why it’s different from other proposals is that it is an investigative tool for enforcement, not an enforcement mechanism on its own

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

It is also important that Congress avoid imposing a specific technical approach on the industry (it’s not good at that), nor require geofencing or kill switches built into chips that would turn this into an unworkable solution

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

By allowing China to procure advanced AI chips, such as those from Nvidia and AMD, we are literally arming our enemy for a potential conflict with us and this has to be addressed with tightening and stricter enforcement of chip export controls

Chip Security Act (CSA) is a new bipartisan bill in Congress that requires advanced AI chips to have location verification to combat illicit diversion of exports of these chips to banned countries like China. A 🧵 on how this could work to enhance US export control enforcement

AI chip diversion to China is a huge problem as it is not only helping CN companies in competition with US firms in the most important industry of the future - AI, but also helps them develop advanced weapons systems that we and our allies would confront in a potential conflict