Panoptes: A Zero-Trust Cryptographic Engine for Low-Latency P2P Poker

Abstract

Traditional digital card games rely on centralized servers, introducing catastrophic single points of failure, while decentralized Web3 alternatives fail to achieve real-time viability due to prohibitive block latency. This paper introduces Panoptes, an optimized, hybrid cryptographic engine that enforces low-latency decentralized consensus for peer-to-peer state channels. Assuming a highly hostile user-space environment, Panoptes treats the host application space and its underlying managed runtime as fundamentally compromised.A bifurcated architecture is detailed utilizing a hardened native airgap and direct OS-level memory mapping to process ciphertexts, bypassing standard and predictable libc allocators. To mitigate automated memory scrapers and frustrate asynchronous Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks, Panoptes implements a multiplexed decoy memory topology (The Vault). This architecture relies on strict virtual page guarding, offline decryption, and temporal starvation via millisecond-scale execution windows. The protocol replaces commutative encryption with a deterministic Hand Commitment Payload, utilizing X25519 KEM, XOR- based Secret Sharing, and ChaCha20-Poly1305 to enforce Strict Zero-Trust Consensus.