Abstract
Modern AI PCs increasingly rely on cameras and microphones to provide contextual intelligence such as presence detection, occupancy estimation, and environmental awareness. However, conventional sensing architectures often expose raw image and audio data to the host operating system, creating privacy and security risks. This article presents a hardware-enforced privacy breakpoint architecture that keeps raw sensing data within an edge sensing module. The module performs local feature extraction, generates de-identified structured outputs, and subsequently erases raw sensing buffers through a dedicated hardware zeroization mechanism. A hardware verification circuit confirms successful memory sanitization before a protected interface releases feature data to the host system. By ensuring that only structured contextual information is transmitted after zeroization and verification, the proposed architecture reduces exposure to host-level compromise, memory-scraping attacks, and unauthorized access to raw multimedia data. Optional attestation mechanisms can further provide verifiable evidence that privacy enforcement has been completed before feature release.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
INC, HP, "Hardware-Enforced Raw Sensing Data Zeroization and Host-Verifiable Privacy Breakpoint", Technical Disclosure Commons, (September 23, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11846