We’ve spent decades hardening software supply chains — signing binaries, scanning dependencies, locking down CI/CD — yet AI models themselves are mostly treated as opaque blobs pulled from the internet. That assumption is increasingly unsafe: models can be tampered with, backdoored, or subtly manipulated to behave maliciously at runtime.

Highflame’s new tool Palisade brings a zero-trust approach to the AI model supply chain. It validates format and structural integrity, detects hidden malicious patterns, verifies provenance via Sigstore/SLSA, and can even trigger behavioral checks to surface backdoors that only activate under certain inputs. Built in Rust for speed and scalability, Palisade makes it feasible to gate models before they hit inference servers or CI/CD pipelines, turning “download and hope” into a verifiable trust boundary.

Author here — happy to answer questions about threat models, performance tradeoffs, or how this fits into CI/CD.