Abstract illustration (Image credit”MEAIN via Google Gemini)

#UAE #cryptography - Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has joined AMD, Intel and OPAQUE as a founding collaborator of TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation, and Compliance Evidence), an open standard for producing verifiable, hardware-attested evidence of what an AI system actually ran and which policies it followed. The specification, also supported by Microsoft, has been contributed to the Linux Foundation for vendor-neutral governance, with its technical workstream hosted by the Coalition for Secure AI. TII is contributing expertise in confidential computing, post-quantum cryptography and identity authentication, and will serve as a reference deployment environment for the standard.

SO WHAT? - As AI systems move from single models running in a controlled environment to autonomous agents acting across sensitive data and tools, simply knowing where a system runs is not enough. TRACE addresses that gap by creating verifiable proof of what AI systems actually did, checkable independently rather than taken on trust from whoever operates the system. The TRACE open standard will allow verification of what ran, under what rules, and how an agent used the data it was given. The standard could prove to be critical for government and regulated industries running sovereign AI with no independent way to confirm if an AI system behaved as intended.

KEY POINTS:

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has joined AMD, Intel and OPAQUE as a founding collaborator of TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation, and Compliance Evidence): a new post-quantum open standard for cryptography.
TRACE gives the open-source community a unified, hardware-attested specification for compliance and security evidence, hosted under neutral governance to keep trust in AI open and portable across any infrastructure.
TRACE produces portable, hardware-attested evidence covering what ran, under which policies, and which data classifications were involved, addressing a gap that has grown as organisations shift from isolated model deployments to agentic AI systems.
The new standard creates a tamper-evident record of what an AI agent ran, which policies were enforced and which tools it invoked, arguing the industry needs portable evidence before the market settles around incompatible vendor trust systems.
TII contributes to the standard across three areas: cryptography-based confidential computing, post-quantum cryptography, and identity and authentication, and is involved in drafting the specification and integrating sovereign components aligned to it.
TII’s contribution ensures attestation records remain trustworthy over their full retention period even as cryptography evolves.
TII will also serve as a reference deployment environment for TRACE, testing the standard against operational sovereign AI requirements and feeding those findings back into the specification.
TRACE is available now as an open specification with reference implementations at trace.agentrust-io.com, with its authors inviting technical review from developers, cloud providers, silicon manufacturers and standards organisations.
TII operates nine research centres spanning cryptography, AI and digital science, quantum computing and secure systems.

ZOOM OUT - In May 2026, OPAQUE acquired TII's confidential AI model training and post-quantum cryptography technology, the first time UAE-developed cryptographic AI had been bought and deployed at scale by a US company. That deal gave OPAQUE a single platform spanning AI training, inference and agent execution with verifiable guarantees at each stage, and the company said it let enterprises and sovereign AI programmes move into production four to five times faster. In June, TII became a founding partner of OPAQUE 3.0, contributing to the post-quantum cryptographic platform. The platform was announced just days after a US executive order directing federal systems toward post-quantum migration. TRACE extends that same partnership outward to help shape an open industry standard for post-quantum cryptography governed by the Linux Foundation.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: TII

LINK

Details of the new TRACE specification (TRACE website)

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Abu Dhabi’s TII joins new AI security standard (Middle East AI News)
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Abu Dhabi’s TII helps found AI trust standard