Re: Hardware True Random Number Generator design / concept

budgie wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 06:16:39 GMT, Robert Baer <robertbaer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Zak wrote:


John Larkin wrote:


The thermal noise generated by any resistor is cryptographically
strong.  Just make sure that your amplifier is not picking up
interference from predictable sources instead of just amplifying the
resistor noise.  A forward-biased diode might produce even more noise,
making the job of amplification easier.


A zener is even better. Its noise density swamps a decent amplifier's
noise (which tends to have bad statistics.)


Or look at what VIA is doing, with one oscillator sampling another and the result being cleaned up cleverly. This is good if you need to do it on a CPU chip; other circumstances may favour other solutions.


Thomas

I do not think that one oscillator sampling another would pass some of the tests. 


Twenty years ago (I'm sure the NDA has expired) our state lottery outfit
commissioned a new micro-based system.  The selected solution included thermal
noise and a couple of PRG's and some correlation maths.  That exceeded all the
prescribed tests.
Thermal noise, zener noise, particle detector driven from radiations source are all excellent candidates.
Shift register (and equivalents) generators fail miserably, even if one uses 2E-9 of the full sequence.
Many software "random number generators" fail in one or more aspects.
One of the most ignored aspect is the *repetition* of numbers and/or patterns.
A truly random sequence can and (eventually) will repeat anything previously generated, and does so randomly, and the number of repetitions is also random.
You may randomly agree or disagree, depending which edge the coin lands on...
.

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