EntroMEMS: Proof-of-Concept Integration of Quantum-Derived Initialization and MEMS Entropy Acquisition on an ESP32

Abstract

Resource-constrained edge devices may have limited entropy during startup. EntroMEMS is a proof-of-concept architecture combining quantum-derived initialization material with candidate physical entropy from three microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) gyroscopes on an ESP32. A 1024-bit quantum-derived pool was embedded in firmware; its first 128 bits initialize the prototype generator. This does not constitute secure provisioning. The revised V2 acquisition retains two least significant bits from each gyroscope axis, yielding 18 binary samples per cycle. Sequential non-IID assessments using the official NIST SP 800-90B software yielded estimates of 0.825393–0.911960 bit/sample across nine baseline sensor streams and 0.815998–0.912364 bit/sample across sensitivity windows. Full SP 800-90B validation was not performed because the prescribed restart dataset was not collected. For a historical V1 conditioned sequence of 1,000,000 bits, all 188 p-values from the official NIST SP 800-22 suite were at least 0.01. Only one sequence was evaluated; across-sequence pass proportions and p-value uniformity were not assessed. A follow-up benchmark averaged 1414.287 microseconds per acquisition-and-extraction cycle, corresponding to 12.7273 kbit/s excluding serial output. These results support prototype feasibility and investigation of an auxiliary entropy input, without establishing cryptographic suitability. Production deployment would require secure provisioning, protected storage, a vetted DRBG, continuous health tests, and conservative entropy accounting.