Opus

The Emerald Tablet lives in silicon.

Read the story

Playground

Hash, encrypt, and explore the seven hermetic principles in your browser. No installation required.

About intent-cipher

A small cipher in Rust. Takes a key, an intent string, and a plaintext — mixes the intent into the key schedule, produces a keystream, XORs with the plaintext. A research artifact and a gesture, not a proposal for production cryptography.

What it does

Binds an arbitrary byte string — an "intent" — into the cipher's key derivation. Two different intents produce two different keystreams, even with the same key and plaintext. A matching intent decrypts; a mismatched intent produces different bytes. The cipher is deterministic, self-inverse (XOR), and zero-dependency.

What it isn't

The cipher does not parse or understand the intent — it hashes the bytes into the key derivation. Functionally, intent behaves like a nonce or a salt under a different name. There is no semantic layer, no policy enforcement, no mathematical guarantee that purpose is preserved. It is a UX framing, not a cryptographic category.

The rigorous cousins

Constructions that formally bind purpose or policy to encryption already exist and are substantially stronger: Attribute-Based Encryption (Sahai & Waters, 2005), Functional Encryption (Boneh, Sahai & Waters, 2011), Predicate Encryption. If you need purpose-bound cryptography for a real system, start there — not here.

Why the hermetic framing

The seven internal state components of the cipher — essence, veil, spectrum, poles, rhythms, causal, seeds — name themselves after the principles in the Kybalion. The framing is a lens, not a proof. It is how this artifact was built and read, not what it claims to be formally. The full exploration lives in Kybalion.

cargo add intent-cipher crates.io source

Chapters

Read all offline — Opus (PDF, 7 chapters)

The Evidence

Currently — April 2026 · Buenos Aires

The work continues. Preparing applications for research-engineering roles at the verifiable-ML and crypto × AI intersection. Publishing under Proof-of-Context. Open to collaboration with teams working on the verification-primitive layer of decentralized ML.