Breakthrough in research of true random number generators

Members of the institute's cryptography research team claim to have produced a series of circuits that are up to 50% smaller than anything else currently available. Optimised for digital circuits, fpga and asic, they are said to 'push efficiency to the limit' by using just one logic gate, one look up table and four transistors respectively. TRNGs are essential for IT security because virtually any security application relies on unpredictable numbers such as cryptographic keys. Current systems are either too expensive or not fast enough for many applications. Faster pseudo-random number generators are in more widespread use even though the sequences they generate can be detected under certain types of attack, making them less secure. The approach of ECIT researchers Jiang Wu and Dr Máire O'Neill has been to use the white noise inside the circuit to generate the randomness, effectively simulating the toss of a coin. To do this, they developed a new mechanism to measure the noise and generate the random output. Wu said the most challenging part of the work was to find the new mechanism that can effectively sample the noise. "True random number generators have been extensively studied in recent years; many very efficient designs based on different noise measurement mechanisms have been proposed. It was not clear if more efficient designs were even possible. After investigating several candidates, finally we found a successful one." The researcher now plan to find ways of making the generators sufficiently robust to be embedded in devices such as mobile phones, smartcards and rfid tags, and – where they are used for security applications - to secure them from attack and develop appropriate countermeasures.