Mehmet Sencan
Mehmet is taking a hardware backstop approach to security and governance of AI compute. Since finishing his BS at Caltech in Applied Physics, he has been pushing chip and manufacturing technology capabilities for over a decade, previously as a full-stack hardware developer, running biosensor manufacturing processes all the way from sensor design to medical device implantation (while ensuring functionality,cost-efficacy, and manufacturability).
Session
As TEEs in high-performance computing hardware become increasingly powerful and valuable targets for espionage and sabotage, protecting the intellectual property, cryptographic keys, and sensitive data they contain is of paramount importance. This talk argues physical destruction provides stronger guarantees than other methods, such as zeroization, but unlike custom-engineered destructive solutions such as PyroMEMS nanothermite, our approach leverages existing industrial components with proven reliability. This significantly reduces the complexity and cost of the implementation. We demonstrate that a common detonator, when appropriately positioned within a modified GPU heatsink, can provide effective physical destruction of the computing hardware. The proposed solution offers a balance of effectiveness, cost, reliability, and implementation simplicity that makes it suitable for immediate deployment in secure computing environments.