Hera XOVEREIGN

XOVEREIGN Technologies · Cryptographic defense

Autonomous Cryptographic
Defense Framework

Hera protects a record with many independent barriers instead of one, using several unrelated families of mathematics at once, and repairs its own containment without an operator in the loop. Seven licensed tiers, from a single barrier to nineteen.

See the seven tiers Pricing API documentation
Maximum barriers 19 Independent objects an attacker must defeat, all of them, for one record.
Post-quantum families 3 Lattice key establishment, lattice signatures, hash-based signatures.
Licensed tiers 7 Each tier contains everything below it, plus its own additions.
Entry price $2.50 Per node, per year, at the base tier. The ladder is published in full.

The product

What Hera is

Most cryptographic protection is a single object. One key agreement, one cipher, one wrap. It is usually a well-chosen object — and it is still one. Break it, or break the one family of mathematics beneath it, and the record is open. Hera is built on the opposite assumption: that one of the things you are relying on will eventually fail, and the design should survive that rather than depend on it not happening.

Self-healing containment

Between each cryptographic layer sits a solid containment sphere. A sphere has no edge and no seam, so there is no orientation at which it is weakest — the property a flat perimeter cannot have, because a wall's corners are where attacks converge.

Puncturing a sphere does not open a path. The breach closes behind the intruder, who is left between two sealed surfaces with no route back out. The damage is detected by the containment itself and repaired with entirely fresh key material, without an operator being paged.

Several unrelated mathematics, together

From the third tier upward, every record carries two signatures from two families that share no mathematical foundation — one rests on lattices, the other on hash functions alone. Both must verify or the record is refused.

The consequence is specific: a cryptanalytic break in either family degrades a record to single-family strength instead of forging it. Key establishment is hybrid for the same reason, from the second tier upward.

Seven tiers, one ladder

The tiers are cumulative: each contains everything below it and adds its own barriers. A fleet can hold different tiers on different classes of node — a logging host at the base, a signing host in the middle, an actuator at the top — under one licence and one console.

Tier selection is a business decision with a published price attached, not a support conversation. The whole ladder is on this page.

The threat this answers, stated plainly

A sufficiently capable quantum computer would break the elliptic-curve and RSA mathematics that most key establishment and most signatures rest on today. Public estimates of when such a machine arrives vary widely and this product does not offer one. The part that is not speculative is the harvesting: encrypted traffic captured now can be stored now and opened later, so the decision about data with a long confidentiality life is being made today whether or not it is being made deliberately.

Hera conforms to the post-quantum standards published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in August 2024, and to the earlier symmetric, hashing and derivation standards. Naming a standard is a statement about conformance and nothing more: no standards body, agency or government has reviewed, endorsed or approved this product, and any representation otherwise would be false.

The containment

Inside a containment sphere

A perimeter is a surface: it has an inside, an outside, and a thickness that runs out. Every attack on one is the same attack — find the thinnest part and cross it. A containment sphere is not a surface. It is a solid volume of white noise with no edge, no seam and no far side, and crossing it is not a thing that finishes.

The geometry carries 360 meridian sectors. The figure draws every tenth of them.

One sphere, measured

Entropy depth
23,500,000 digits
Depth, as stored
9.31 MiB
Against an AES-256 key
304,943×
Meridian sectors
360
Addressed per sphere
3.27 GiB
Regeneration budget
180 ns
Regenerations per second
5,555,556
Barriers in the architecture
19

The comparison with AES-256 is a comparison of how much key material, and nothing more. An AES-256 key is 77 decimal digits; a sphere carries 23.5 million of them. It does not mean the sphere is 304,943 times harder to break — cryptographic strength does not scale with length that way, and AES-256 is not weakened by the comparison. It is one of the nineteen barriers, sitting inside the same architecture the spheres separate.

The three mechanics

Depth, regeneration and suffocation are not three features. They are one behaviour described at three moments: what an attack meets, what happens behind it, and what it becomes.

1 · Depth

Twenty-three and a half million digits of solid entropy, identical in every one of the 360 directions. There is no orientation at which the sphere is thinner, because depth is radial and the surface has no corners for an attack to converge on.

So an attack does not breach a sphere and arrive somewhere. It sinks in, and keeps sinking, and the far side it is heading for is not there.

2 · Regeneration

Every 180 nanoseconds, flat, at every tier, the sphere rewrites a measure of its own depth — and it rewrites it behind the intrusion. The region an attack has already crossed is re-keyed, so what it mapped on the way in stops existing.

That is what seals an attack inside rather than merely slowing it down. There is no route back out, because the route was the first thing to go.

3 · Suffocation

Sealed inside a medium that keeps rewriting itself, a payload has nothing to hold on to. Whatever made it an attack — the operators, the offsets, the ordering — is replaced by bytes its author did not choose and cannot predict.

When nothing structured is left, the sphere absorbs the remains as further entropy. The attack does not simply fail. It is taken in, and the sphere is deeper afterwards than it was before, by the attack.

Generated ahead of the intrusion, never held whole

Holding every sphere's full depth resident would be tens of gigabytes of noise sitting in memory doing nothing, on the overwhelming likelihood that nobody is attacking. The containment does not work that way. Depth is addressable: any point of it can be produced directly from its own coordinates, so the sphere keeps a small working window and generates forward faster than anything can descend.

The consequence is the one that matters at the point of contact: the depth is always already there when it is reached, and never held when it is not. An intrusion never arrives at an edge the generator has not got to yet, and an idle sphere costs almost nothing to keep.

The two formulas

Both are published so the figures on this page can be checked rather than taken. The result under each one is computed in your browser from the formula as written, at tier 7.

Regeneration speed

(c / 8) ÷ [ (F(n) · φ8) ÷ π ]3

Evaluates to 5.100901 µs at tier 7. The figure the containment is held to is a flat 0.18 µs at every tier, measured against a clock on every regeneration rather than derived. The formula is published so the derivation can be checked; the enforced budget is the one with a measurement behind it.

Entropy depth

[ F(n) · φc · π ]3 ÷ 8

Evaluates to 23,494,845 digits, which is the published 23.5 million. It is the same at every tier for a reason that is visible in the formula: F(n) enters only through its logarithm, which is under 1.2 across the whole ladder, against the 62.65 million contributed by φc. Tier 1 and tier 7 are four tenths of one digit apart.

Nineteen barriers, alternating

Seven quantum levels, six solid spheres and six sphere encryptions. The order is the design: a sphere is never the outermost barrier, so nothing reaches one without having been through encryption first — and no two spheres are adjacent, so an attack that survives one sphere arrives not at another sphere but at a different kind of mathematics.

  1. 01 L1 AMBER Quantum level

Drive one, here

The controls below run a real containment sphere in this page. Depth is real addressable white noise; a puncture reads a real byte at a real depth; regeneration re-keys the region behind the front and that byte genuinely comes back different; a trapped payload is really overwritten and really folded back into the entropy this sphere generates from.

One figure is honestly not reproducible here, and the readout says so rather than rounding it away: a browser cannot regenerate in 180 nanoseconds. The demonstration reports the time it measured, and the 180 ns budget is what the licensed engine is measured at on the machine that runs it.

Penetration depth
at the surface
Byte at depth 1,000
not yet read
Route behind the front
open
Regions re-keyed
0
Payloads suffocating
0
Entropy absorbed from attacks
0 digits
Measured in this browser
not yet measured

The ladder

Seven tiers

Barrier count is the number of independent cryptographic objects that must all be defeated to recover one protected record. It rises by three at every step: one more cryptographic level, one more containment sphere, and that sphere's own independent encryption.

Tier 1

AMBER

Baseline containment for data whose disclosure is inconvenient rather than material.

Barriers
1
Spheres
1 white-noise containment sphere
PQ families
None — classical strength only
Self-healing
No
Key rotation
Every 90 days
Standards
FIPS 197 · FIPS 198-1 · FIPS 180-4 · RFC 5869
Price
$2.50 per node, per year

Every record is encrypted and authenticated before it is written, and a record altered by a single bit fails to open rather than opening wrong. This is the floor of the ladder, and it is stated as a floor: it carries no post-quantum protection at all.

For: internal tooling, low-sensitivity logs, non-regulated operational data.

Tier 2

SAPPHIRE

Post-quantum key establishment for anything that crosses a wire.

Barriers
4
Spheres
2 self-healing containment spheres
PQ families
1 — lattice key encapsulation
Self-healing
Yes
Key rotation
Every 30 days
Standards
Tier 1 · FIPS 203
Price
$10.00 per node, per year

Key establishment is hybrid: an attacker must break lattice mathematics and elliptic-curve mathematics, in the same session, to recover a key. This is the tier that answers harvest-now-decrypt-later — traffic captured today stays closed later, because breaking one family is not enough.

For: schools and universities, SaaS in transit, partner integrations, public APIs.

Tier 3

EMERALD

Two post-quantum signature families on every record, and both must verify.

Barriers
7
Spheres
3 self-healing containment spheres
PQ families
2 — lattice KEM, and two signature families
Self-healing
Yes
Key rotation
Every 14 days
Standards
Tier 2 · FIPS 204 · FIPS 205
Price
$17.50 per node, per year

Integrity is signed twice, by families resting on unrelated mathematics. Both signatures must verify or the record is refused. This is the lowest tier at which a signature failure is a security event rather than a maintenance ticket.

For: financial messaging, medical records, legal instruments, audit trails, evidence.

Tier 4

RUBY

All three post-quantum families, with self-healing containment between every layer.

Barriers
10
Spheres
4 self-healing containment spheres
PQ families
3 — all published families in use together
Self-healing
Yes
Key rotation
Every 7 days
Standards
Tier 3, at full composition
Price
$25.00 per node, per year

The three post-quantum families run together, and solid containment spheres sit between each cryptographic layer. Each sphere carries its own independent encryption, so the count of things that must be broken is ten, not one. This is the first tier where containment repairs itself under load.

For: banks and payment networks, insurers, critical SaaS, national retail, utilities.

Tier 5

DIAMOND

Highest-category key establishment inside twelve independently keyed zones.

Barriers
13
Spheres
5 self-healing containment spheres
Zones
12 independently keyed containment zones
PQ families
3, at the highest published security category
Key rotation
Every 24 hours
Standards
Tier 4 · NSA CNSA 2.0 key establishment
Price
$32.50 per node, per year

Key establishment moves to the highest security category the standard defines, and the protected estate is divided into twelve containment zones holding independent keys with no shared trust boundary. Compromising one zone yields one zone, and the breach triggers a re-key of all twelve rather than a page to an operator.

For: critical national infrastructure, defence supply chain, central banking, grid operators.

Tier 6

OBSIDIAN

Sovereign: one holder, one authority, and no administrative override.

Barriers
16
Spheres
6 self-healing containment spheres
Zones
12 independently keyed containment zones
Authority
Sovereign credential only — no vendor recovery
Key rotation
Every 12 hours
Standards
Tier 5 · RFC 7914
Price
$40.00 per node, per year

Above this line the operator of the system is not the authority over it. A single sovereign credential is the only thing that unseals the tier: no support escalation, no break-glass account, no vendor-side recovery — by construction rather than by policy.

That is a deliberate trade and it cuts both ways. The estate cannot be opened by coercing an administrator. It also cannot be opened if the credential is lost. Buyers are briefed on custody before this tier is provisioned.

For: crown-jewel intellectual property, model weights, root key material, board-level records.

Tier 7 · the top of the ladder

TORTOISE

Energy-grade: every barrier sealed at rest, because the failure mode is physical.

Barriers
19
Spheres
7 self-healing containment spheres
Zones
12 zones, sealed at rest rather than on breach
Authority
Sovereign credential for every privileged action
Key rotation
Every hour
Rate plane
Dedicated, not shared
Price
$47.50 per node, per year

Every tier below protects information, and their worst case is disclosure. This tier exists for systems whose worst case is a machine acting on a forged instruction — a battery told to accept a charge it cannot survive, a breaker told to close on a live fault, an actuator told to move while a person is inside its envelope.

That is a different threat model, so the posture inverts. All nineteen barriers are engaged at rest and all twelve zones are sealed before the first request arrives, rather than sealing in response to a breach. It is the slowest tier by a wide margin, and it is meant to be: the cost is paid up front, permanently, in exchange for a system that is never briefly open while it decides to close.

For: grid-scale energy control, industrial actuation, autonomous physical systems, flight and rail.

Tiers are cumulative. A node at Tier 5 holds every protection from Tiers 1 through 4 as well, which is why the barrier count is additive rather than a choice between options.

Where this sits

Against the deployment categories in use today

The comparison below is between categories of deployment, not between named organisations. A large estate typically runs several of these at once, so the category is the honest unit — and no other company's name belongs on this page.

Barrier count is the number of independent cryptographic objects that must all be defeated to recover one protected record. Higher is not automatically better for every workload — each barrier costs time on every operation, which is why the ladder exists rather than one maximum setting.
Deployment category Barriers PQ families Self-healing Protects at rest Harvest-resistant
Standard transport encryption 1 0 No No No
Hybrid post-quantum transport 2 1 No No Yes, in transit
Managed key-service envelope encryption 2 0 No Yes No
Hardware security module, classical suite 2 0 No Yes No
Hera · Tier 4 RUBY 10 3 Yes Yes Yes
Hera · Tier 7 TORTOISE 19 3 Yes Yes, sealed at rest Yes

What the table does not say

It does not say the categories above are badly built. Hybrid post-quantum transport is a serious piece of engineering and hardware key custody is excellent at the job it does. The difference is one of depth and of scope: those are single objects protecting one leg of a system's life, and Hera is a stack of independent objects protecting the record itself, wherever it goes.

It also does not claim that this cannot be broken. No cryptographic system can honestly be described that way, and this one is not an exception. What it claims is arithmetic: nineteen independent barriers require nineteen breaks, not one.

The cost, stated

Depth is not free. Every barrier is real work on every operation, so the top tier is materially slower than the bottom one — that is the trade the ladder exists to let a buyer make deliberately, per class of node, rather than once for a whole estate.

Measured throughput and latency for each tier, on stated hardware and against equivalent classical and hybrid configurations, are provided under a mutual non-disclosure agreement as part of evaluation. Figures are not published here because a benchmark without its methodology attached is not evidence.

Licensing

Priced per node, by barrier

One published rate, one multiplication. A node's annual licence is $2.50 per active barrier — so the base tier is $2.50 and the top tier is $47.50, with every step in between derivable on this page. There is no negotiated list price, no per-operation metering and no seat count.

The ladder

Tier Barriers Per node / year
1 · AMBER1$2.50
2 · SAPPHIRE4$10.00
3 · EMERALD7$17.50
4 · RUBY10$25.00
5 · DIAMOND13$32.50
6 · OBSIDIAN16$40.00
7 · TORTOISE19$47.50

Volume

Applied to the whole fleet, not marginally. A buyer at ten thousand nodes pays the ten-thousand-node rate on all ten thousand.

Fleet sizeRate
1 – 999 nodesList
1,000 – 9,999 nodes15% off
10,000 – 99,999 nodes28% off
100,000 – 999,999 nodes40% off
1,000,000 nodes and above50% off

Estimate a fleet

Every figure below is computed from the published rate on this page. Nothing is hidden and nothing is rounded in your favour.

A node is one device, container or process holding a licence. Whole numbers, one or more.

Estimate only. It is not a quotation, an offer, or a contract, and it excludes onboarding, migration and any sovereign-tier custody engagement.

Included at every tier

  • Automatic key rotation on the tier's cadence
  • Self-healing containment from Tier 2 upward
  • The operator console and the full API
  • Compliance reporting with gaps disclosed
  • Version updates for the licence term

Not charged for

  • Operations — there is no per-call price
  • Seats, operators or console users
  • Key generation, rotation or revocation
  • Egress of your own protected records

Priced separately

  • Migration of an existing estate
  • Sovereign custody briefing and escrow design, Tiers 6 and 7
  • Dedicated rate plane commissioning, Tier 7
  • On-site installation for air-gapped estates

Next

Evaluate it against your own estate

The operator console runs the containment engine locally so you can watch a sphere be punctured, detected and repaired without provisioning anything. The API documentation covers the whole interface. Neither requires a sales conversation first.

Open the console Read the API documentation