Synthesis Tamper-evident Attestation and Molecular Provenance (STAMP): Cryptographic Molecular Barcoding for DNA Synthesizers

As AI lowers the design barrier for dangerous biology and benchtop DNA synthesizers proliferate, the biothreat bottleneck shifts from design to physical synthesis. We introduce STAMP (Synthesis Tamper-evident Attestation and Molecular Provenance): a 120-base cryptographic barcode that an HSM-equipped synthesizer stamps into a non-coding region of every DNA it produces, attesting that the sequence originated from an untampered, registered synthesizer and was not significantly modified post-synthesis. STAMP combines HSM-anchored cryptographic attestation with a novel content-aware landmark map that enables forensic reconstruction of post-synthesis modifications. Empirically, the encoder succeeds on 100% of N = 2000 random plasmids, and the privacy-preserving landmark signal alone detects ≥95% of kilobase-scale insertions. We prove that no system of this class can fully defeat a determined attacker; instead, STAMP is a cost imposer and evidence generator that converts every viable attack into a forensically suspicious artifact or a supply-chain-visible event.