goal: turn knowledge into a shipped system and a public artifact
objective Expertise is proven by building and by teaching. A natural capstone — especially if you work anywhere near key custody — is an enclave-anchored key-custody / signing service.
Trace the trust end-to-end to a pinned hardware root; explain why each register matters; then defend it against an adversary who controls the host machine. That defense is the real exam.
Build one: the key-custody service above, or a small library that verifies attestation from two platforms behind one clean interface, or a fleet running Keylime with a real revoke action.
Teach it: turn your Phase-7 paper + capstone into a public writeup or talk, and contribute one upstream fix (docs, a test vector, an SDK bug). Teaching surfaces the gaps in your model and builds the reputation the word "expert" actually means.
final mastery gate
You've shipped a working attested system whose trust you can trace to a pinned hardware root, and you can teach the whole loop — genesis to frontier — from a blank whiteboard, every diagram redrawn from memory. At that point the label is earned.