Toshiba shows 2Mbps hardware RNG

[Dave Korn]

On 11 February 2008 17:37, Crawford Nathan-HMGT87 wrote:

>> EE Times: Toshiba tips random-number generator IC
>> 
>>   SAN FRANCISCO -- Toshiba Corp. has claimed a major breakthrough in
>>   the field of security technology: It has devised the world's
>>   highest-performance physical random-number generator (RNG)   circuit.
>> 
>>   The device generates random numbers at a data rate of 2.0 megabits
>>   a second, according to Toshiba in a paper presented at the
>>   International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here.
> 
> I'm wondering if they've considered the possibility of EMI skewing the
> operation of the device, or other means of causing the device to
> genearate "less than completely random" numbers.

  Not necessarily a problem, although it does depend on their design.  Even if
by saturating the chip in an intense EM field you can skew the result almost
all the way to 1 or 0, won't the standard debiassing trick of examining
successive pairs of bits handle that?

> There used to be (maybe still) a TCP spoofing exploit that relied on the
> timing of packets; there are also various de-anonymization attacks based
> on clock skew.  With a chip like this, you could add a small, random
> number to the timestamp, or even packet delay, and effectively thwart
> such attacks.  Such systems need high-bandwidth, random number
> generators.

  The original paper on the clock skew identity tracking technique suggested
that naive randomisation doesn't help; adding a bit of randomisation just
introduces noise into your dataset, but you can still clearly see the slope of
the line they're clustered around.

    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....

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