Ignacio "Nacho" Agustin Randazzo is a security researcher and embedded systems engineer based in Villa Carlos Paz, Córdoba, Argentina. With 8+ years across ASIC digital design, Linux infrastructure administration, vulnerability research, and embedded development, he works across the entire stack -- from silicon to software to security. He believes in understanding systems from the transistor up, and that breadth is not a lack of focus -- it's the ability to see threats and solutions that specialists miss.

He previously built AI-assisted security audit tooling at Maxwell Security (2024-2025), where he designed reproducible assessment pipelines and automation for vulnerability discovery. Before that, he designed production RTL for multi-million-gate fiber optic ASICs at Marvell Technology and managed Linux infrastructure at UTN's research center (CIII). He has conducted security audits of electronic voting systems, developed embedded Linux drivers for biomedical research hardware, and designed dynamically reconfigurable FPGA communication channels for DSP emulation.

Before the LLM era, he worked on neural networks and studied the underlying mathematics. Now he builds agentic systems with local models, focused on security, trust, and sovereignty. His current project, i.ar, is a self-modifying AI operating environment built in Emacs, hardened in Podman, powered entirely by local LLMs -- no cloud, no telemetry, no backdoors. He built it in 10 days without knowing Emacs Lisp; the AI wrote most of the code, including the parts he couldn't.

He is a strong advocate for free/libre software and self-hosted infrastructure. He spoke at ekoparty 2024 on FPGA-based password hash cracking, demonstrating power efficiency near GPU performance at Arduino-level power draw. He returns in 2026 to talk about what happens when you give an AI agent a terminal and let it modify its own code.

He holds a B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from UTN (Universidad Tecnológica Nacional), Córdoba, with honors-level GPA (8/10) and specialization in digital design and computer architecture. He is C2 proficient in English (University of Michigan certificate, IICANA). He is an active CTF competitor, bug bounty researcher, and open-source contributor.

Personal site: https://randazzo.ar
GitHub: https://github.com/randazzo-ignacio