Proposal: Move hardware fingerprinting to Rust (aligned with roadmap)

[TrishaG189]

Move hardware fingerprinting to Rust (aligned with roadmap)

Description

Hey team,

While going through the roadmap, I noticed the long-term plan to migrate the camera OS to Rust. Since the hardware identity layer is a core and security-sensitive part of the system, I took a look at how it’s currently implemented.

At the moment, hardware_identity.py is responsible for generating the device fingerprint. Given that this involves low-level system reads and cryptographic hashing, it seems like a good candidate to start introducing Rust.

---

Possible approach

• Rust module
  Build a small, isolated Rust binary to handle fingerprint generation (e.g., reading from /proc/cpuinfo with graceful fallbacks)

• EVM-aligned hashing
  Use Keccak256 (tiny-keccak) instead of SHA-256 to align with EVM usage

• Initial integration (non-breaking)
  Output the fingerprint as JSON so the existing Python app can consume it via a subprocess

• Future improvement
  Explore using PyO3 to integrate the Rust logic directly into Python and remove subprocess overhead

---