Sentinel, from ZeroCopy Systems
Sign trades inside a hardware enclave, in your own AWS account.
Sentinel keeps a trading key inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, where nothing on the host can read it. The signature itself takes about 40 microseconds; the round trip into the enclave and back, about 120. You run it, so we never hold your keys.
Where it stands: a working prototype. It hasn’t yet been measured inside an enclave or used in production, and we’re looking for a first pilot to do both with.
How a signature is made
Everything runs on one machine in your AWS account. The key never leaves the enclave.
The numbers, briefly
Every figure on this site says what kind it is: measured by us, published by someone else, or our estimate.
Where the old 42 µs and 62 µs came from, and how these were measured →
What it does
The key stays in the enclave
Sentinel creates the key inside a Nitro Enclave: a separate virtual machine with no disk, no network and no shell, whose memory even the host’s root user can’t read. Requests go in and signatures come out. No request returns the key.
The security model →Your rules, next to the key
A policy engine for order size, signing rate, allowed contracts and chains, and trading hours is built and tested. Applying it to each real transaction is the next piece of work, and we say so plainly.
The policy engine →It stops when timing goes wrong
The enclave watches its own timing. When jitter stays above a set limit, it refuses new sessions, and it recovers by itself once things are steady again.
The kill switch →Work with us
Two ways in, both scoped with you before anything starts.
A pilot
We bring Sentinel up in your AWS account with you, measure it on your instances and your workload, and you keep every number. It’s how the estimate on this site becomes a measurement.
Talk to us →An engineering sprint
A fixed-price, fixed-scope look at your execution path, your key custody or your enclave, with a written report and the fixes.
Talk to us →zcp, free and open source
An eBPF tool that shows where a Linux trading process waits: on the scheduler, or on the network. Apache-2.0, with signed binaries.
About zcp →Read
- How it works7 min readThe path of a signature, where the key lives, the policy engine, the kill switch, and what’s built versus planned.
- Latency, measured and estimated9 min readWhere 42 µs and 62 µs came from, why the band is so narrow, and our estimate for the trip through an enclave.
- The security model6 min readWhat an enclave protects, what it doesn’t, and what you’d still have to trust.