I’m excited to share that I’ll be speaking at FIPS ‘n’ Chips 2026, hosted by the Crypto-V Alliance in Austin, TX. I’ll be in Austin October 26-27 and am open to meetings. If you work on entropy, key generation, or validation, or you’re a lab, integrator, or vendor who wants to compare notes, send me a message and let’s find a time.
Where to find us
- Talk: Rolling The Dice: Entropy Source Validation Lessons from a Macro-Scale Electromechanical Noise Source
- Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2026
- Time: 11:15 AM to 11:45 AM CT (CMVP Deep Dive Track)
- Location: AT&T Hotel & Conference Center, Junior Ballroom, 1900 University Ave, Austin, TX 78705
- Conference: October 26-27, 2026, Austin, TX
Register for FIPS ‘n’ Chips or view the full schedule.
Why this talk matters
Nearly every physical entropy source submitted for validation under SP 800-90B comes from the same small family of microelectronic noise mechanisms. That monoculture is a systemic risk.
Our talk reports practical experience validating a very different kind of source: physical dice tumbling in fluid, read optically. We’ll cover the fluid dynamics behind the noise, the imaging and raw noise samples, and the properties that matter for validation rather than for marketing.
We’ll also get into how entropy actually reaches applications, through the seeding paths of widely used open-source cryptographic libraries and the entropy assumptions documented in their code.
Let’s meet in Austin
I’ll be in town October 26-27. If you work on entropy, key generation, or validation, or you’re a lab, integrator, or vendor who wants to compare notes, send me a message and let’s find a time.
The team behind the work
This work is a team effort, and I’m grateful to the people who made it possible:
- Tim Hall, whose stochastic model underpins our entropy analysis
- Jacob Maynard of SafeLogic and Volodymyr Zabolotnyi, University of Tampa ’27, who built much of the hardware testing and results
- John Walton of Engix Design, who designed our hardware