CERTANIX

The problem

European manufacturers of autonomous and AI-enabled systems can build machines that work. What they cannot do at the speed procurement now demands is prove to an authority or a purchaser that the machine behaves as claimed, in a form that party can check for itself.

That file is produced today by consultants, by hand, per programme, per variant, per software release. It is believed rather than verified, and it has to be rebuilt every time the software changes.

What Certanix does

Certanix produces that file as a machine-verifiable artifact instead: cryptographically signed pre-certification evidence about how a system behaved under adversarially selected test, which a recipient verifies offline, on their own machine, without trusting the manufacturer and without trusting us.

Where this applies

The evidence pack, the offline verifier and the capability gate are independent of what is being tested. They describe results, the provenance of those results and the entitlement to assert them, not the machine that produced them. That is what makes this an infrastructure layer rather than a tool for one domain.

Tested end to end today on aerial and ground vehicle classes, with further classes ingested. The same layer applies to any system that ships software into a safety-relevant role, and the roadmap follows the regimes rather than the hardware: autonomous and AI-enabled machinery first, then the wider set of products and operators whose obligations turn on the same question, which is whether this particular build behaves as claimed.

Where a system class is not yet registered as validated, the platform produces no artifact asserting a result for it. The boundary between what has been demonstrated and what has not is enforced in the product, not promised in a document.

Two parties, one file

Verify before you deploy.

An operator accepting a software update to a safety-relevant system has traditionally had one thing to go on: the supplier's assurance that the new build will not break anything. A signed evidence pack replaces that assurance with something the operator checks on their own machine, offline, before the build goes into service.

So the same file serves two parties. The manufacturer produces it; the authority, the purchaser or the operator verifies it. Neither has to trust the other, and neither has to trust us. When a purchaser writes offline-verifiable evidence into a specification, the requirement travels down the supply chain without anyone having to sell it there.

What you can check rather than believe

• Verification is offline and producer-independent An open-source verifier checks the pack on your own machine, with no Certanix server, account or service involved. Verify a pack yourself, in your browser or on the command line. Try it in five minutes.
• The signing root is hardware Evidence packs are signed by a YubiHSM 2 in FIPS mode, validated under NIST CMVP certificate 5302, with the device attestation chain verified through five links to the Yubico attestation root. Current signing key fingerprint, SHA-256 over the DER SPKI:
  5849:0777:84FA:6061:6EA8:3E8B:FF35:C8B2:94E1:7631:A424:35CD:2019:2DD0:9D9F:9AE5
• Rotation signs forward, and history is never re-signed Artifacts signed before 4 September 2026 carry the superseded key and keep verifying against it. Re-signing an old record would re-date the estate and destroy the retention property that makes long-lived evidence worth holding. The key lineage is published, including its one recorded exception.
• Published schemas are immutable Every schema version a signed artifact references stays at its own permanent address, unchanged, for as long as the artifact exists. A correction is a new path, never an edit. The published vocabulary and schemas are open, at schema.certanix.eu.

Why now

The regulatory clock is not a forecast. It is a set of dates that have already been set.

11 Sep 2026

The Cyber Resilience Act's reporting obligations become applicable: actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents must be notified.

20 Jan 2027

The Machinery Regulation applies.

2 Dec 2027

The AI Act binds Annex III high-risk systems, on the date set by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744.

11 Dec 2027

The Cyber Resilience Act applies in full, conformity assessment included. No harmonised standard supporting the Act has yet been cited in the Official Journal, so the presumption of conformity is unavailable and third-party assessment is the live route for important products.

2 Aug 2028

The AI Act binds Annex I products carrying high-risk AI as a safety component, with duties reaching vehicles through sectoral law.

Manufacturers must therefore prepare evidence now, against requirements whose test matrices do not yet exist.

Who

• Axel FerrazziniFounder and Chief Executive Officer
• Mircea GeoanăChairman-designate. Formerly Deputy Secretary General of NATO
• Ludovic PerretSenior Advisor, cryptography and post-quantum security
• Bruno FédriciAdvisor
• Geoffrey Le GourriérecAdvisor

What we do not claim

• No notified body has yet accepted a Certanix evidence pack. Obtaining that acceptance is a milestone, not a formality.
• The platform carries no security certification today and we claim none. A proportionate qualification route is planned. It is not done.
• Certanix is in formation. The intellectual property position is deliberately simple: one author, one assignment at incorporation.