Research Partner Program

NFI is a digital forensics platform for laboratories that keep evidence on their own premises, under their own law. I am the founder. We are building, from first principles, a lawful device-access capability for locked devices, delivered to licensed laboratories only through signed Capability Packs. The software enforces the legal gate itself: a locked-tier extraction is refused unless the operator first records a court-order authorization, bound to the case and the device in a signed, hash-chained record, before any method runs.
Stated plainly: this program starts from zero proven capability, and our public claims stay "no unlocking" until a method is proven. Research runs only on devices the researcher or the company owns.
Instead of a job posting, this is a research exchange. Independent researchers and laboratories who join as research partners receive the NFI platform at no charge while they are active partners, plus Academy access. In return, partners share the device-access research they produce on owned devices: methods, findings, and limits. We validate shared research on our own reference devices to a fixed proof standard, write proven methods into our coverage matrix with the contributor credited, and only then productize them into Capability Packs. Unproven research ships nowhere.
The conditions are the same ones our own team works under, and they do not bend: owned devices only; the court-order gate on every locked-tier extraction; responsible disclosure; and plain disqualifiers, because they are continuing conditions of partnership: no history of selling exploits to brokers for offensive use, no involvement in the stolen-data trade, no work on devices the program does not own.
The bar is evidence, not polish: published vulnerability research on mobile platforms, CVE credits or equivalent credited disclosures, or a verifiable laboratory record. The research tracks are MediaTek, Unisoc, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, and passcode recovery, weighted toward the devices our markets actually seize.
Apply: email [email protected] with links to your published research and your CVE credits, or your laboratory's equivalent record. That evidence is the application.