The present invention relates to systems and devices for generating random numbers that might be required for applications such as, for example, cryptography, secure transmissions, and direct encryption.
With the advent of the internet of things (IoT), internet security concerns have increased dramatically. A huge number of devices are currently communicating in open networks with little or no security. The possibility of network intrusion via this weakness, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, has sparked great interest in generating secure communications. Because most IoT devices are based on low power system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs to fit the operational requirements of IoT, full security approaches may benefit from solutions with little circuit overhead or additional power consumption.
Secure communications typically require random number generation to create a secure key. The security of the key is directly related to the randomness of the number generation. Various software approaches have been employed to generate pseudo random binary sequences (PRBS), but these can be cracked with sufficient computing power. Better sources of randomness are natural non-deterministic processes such as, for example, nuclear decay.