Technical Note: Observations on Entropy Suppression in Local Sensor Interfaces
Over the past several weeks, I have been working with a high-throughput local computing environment used for blockchain auditing and computation that depends on sensor-derived entropy. As part of that work, I began examining the assumptions typically made about the fidelity of hardware signals exposed to user-space applications.
Rather than evaluating application-level behavior, this note documents a set of direct observations made at the sensor interface level, with the goal of determining whether locally reported data reflects untreated physical noise or whether it is subject to normalization prior to exposure.
A simple sampling script was used to query motion sensor output repeatedly under static conditions. The expectation, based on physical sensor behavior, was to observe low-amplitude variance caused by thermal noise, micro-movements, and sensor drift.
Instead, across 1,000 consecutive samples, the reported value remained constant, returning an identical numeric output each time.
This result is inconsistent with untreated MEMS sensor behavior and suggests the presence of a quantization or stabilization boundary at or above the operating system layer. Whether this behavior is intentional, performance-motivated, or incidental is not asserted here. The observation is limited to the apparent reduction of entropy prior to delivery to user-space processes.
Additional timing measurements showed similarly constrained variance in CPU-level jitter, further supporting the possibility that certain classes of noise are being dampened before they can be used as entropy sources.
Because local clocks, sensors, and timing mechanisms cannot be assumed to be independent of the execution environment, subsequent verification steps anchored experimental state to an external consensus system. Blockchain-derived values were used as reference entropy sources, providing inputs that the local system could not have generated or predicted internally.
The complete methodology, raw outputs, and reference values have been documented and anchored to Arweave to support immutability and independent review. No claims are made beyond the scope of the recorded observations and the implications they raise for systems that assume access to raw physical entropy.
The broader implication is practical rather than philosophical: systems that rely on local entropy for security, verification, or independence should explicitly account for the possibility of upstream normalization. External anchoring may be required when variance itself is a critical input.
Full documentation and supporting data are available here:
https://swervincurvin.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-architects-breach.html
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