Security through impossibility
Every breach follows the same pattern: attackers acquire authority meant for legitimate users. Traditional security makes this difficult. Tide makes it impossible.
A foundational principle in cryptography, that applies to systems generally, is that a system's security should stand even if everything about it is public knowledge - everything except the key! Compromise that key and the system collapses entirely.
"Every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness, and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse."
— Bruce Schneier, 2002
Tide treats authority as the most sensitive secret in any system. It embodies that authority in cryptographic key material, the purest digital form of power over identity, access, and data. With Tide, any actor's unique agency can be expressed as a key - whether it's a user attesting to their identity, an IAM root key issuing JWTs, or a service decrypting protected data. Tide eliminates that secret by disintegrating it so it ceases to exist as a singular entity forever. An adversary can know everything and still achieve nothing. The ultimate security isn't hiding authority better. It's making sure it's beyond anyone's reach. That's not an incremental improvement - it's a fundamental redefinition of what security means.
