Anything can be generated now.
Almost nothing can be proven.
A reading signed by device-burned silicon proves it came from that specific piece of hardware, in that place, at that time. As synthetic content becomes indistinguishable from real, that guarantee stops being a technicality.
The scarce thing is no longer data.
Generative systems have made images, documents, readings and records trivially fabricable at essentially zero cost. Every process that depends on someone submitting evidence — a claim, an inspection, a compliance filing, a measurement — now sits on an assumption that no longer holds.
The response has been an industry-wide push toward provenance: standards for cryptographically signing content at the moment of capture, so a verifier can establish where something came from rather than trusting that it looks right.
Camera manufacturers have shipped this into professional hardware, with news organisations as launch partners — and notably, they charge for it. That’s the clearest signal available that provenance is a product rather than a feature.
Cameras capture images.
Justworx devices capture the physical world.
Temperature, current, vibration, position, presence, state — continuously, from fixed locations, on hardware with an identity that can’t be forged.
The applications that matter share one property: someone is currently paying out, or signing off, on evidence they cannot verify.
An inspection that cannot be staged
Remote verification where the device attests to what it measured, not what someone reports it measured.
A reading that cannot be backdated
Continuous monitoring where the timestamp is as trustworthy as the value.
A location that cannot be asserted from an office
Presence established by hardware that was demonstrably there.
A compliance record that survives audit
Because it was signed by silicon, not typed into a form.
“Signed by a key” isn’t the useful question.
Software attestation answers the question “was this signed by a key?” Hardware attestation answers “was this signed by that device?” — and only the second one is useful when the incentive to fabricate is financial.
Justworx already has the difficult component. Every device carries an identity fused at manufacture that can’t be extracted, copied or transferred — built into every unit we ship, on a private network that never touches the public internet. As the fleet grows, so does the reach of that guarantee.
We didn’t build that for attestation. But it’s exactly the foundation attestation requires.
The section that makes the rest believable.
- The market is younger than the technology, and we’ll say so. Provenance standards are real and shipping, but the commercial market for attested sensor data — as opposed to attested images — is still forming. We think that’s an opportunity. We don’t think it’s a certainty, and we’d rather be straight about which is which.
- “Proof of reality” is a philosophy, not a product. The versions that convert are specific: reducing fraudulent claims for an insurer, or producing compliance evidence for someone facing a mandate. We’re building toward those, not toward an abstraction. Prior attempts in this space failed largely by selling the abstraction.
- Attestation is only as strong as its weakest firmware path. The industry has already seen a signing implementation broken through an unexpected feature interaction, invalidating an entire population of certificates at once. That’s the correct standard to be held to, and it means the security of the whole signing path — not just the key — has to be right. Reputational fragility here is high and recovery is slow.
- Identity proves origin, not truth. Hardware identity proves which device produced a reading. It doesn’t prove the sensor was calibrated or the installation was sound. A complete system needs calibration, tamper evidence and lifecycle management alongside the signature. We’d rather name that than let the cryptography imply more than it delivers.
Honest about the distance.
Fused per-device identity and network-level isolation, built into every unit — the hard part of the foundation. A fleet of devices in fixed, known locations is what we’re building toward.
A signing and attestation pathway from sensor reading to verifiable record, built to established provenance standards rather than a proprietary scheme.
Working with partners in the sectors where unverifiable evidence is currently an accepted cost of doing business — and demonstrating it doesn’t have to be.