Toshiba shows 2Mbps hardware RNG

[Crawford Nathan-HMGT87]

>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.

It is certainly an interesting device; I think this would find
considerable use in communication infrastructure and high-bandwidth
applications.  As someone else mentioned, generating a single, random,
128 bit seed is not too difficult with current technology, but it
doesn't address the issue that often times you want more than just a
single key.  One of the problems with the Linux random number generator
is that it happens to be quite slow, especially if you need a lot of
data.

Some potential uses:
1.) Secure file erasure.
2.) OTP keygen for those _really_ high security applications.
3.) Faster symmetric keyset generation.  You know, when you need to
build 32k keys...
4.) Random seeding of communication packets.

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.


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