[cryptography] Random number generation influenced, HW RNG

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sun Sep 8 06:09:25 PDT 2013


----- Forwarded message from "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> -----

Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 15:22:58 +1000
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
To: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls at panix.com>
Cc: cryptography at randombit.net
Subject: Re: [cryptography] Random number generation influenced, HW RNG
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Reply-To: jamesd at echeque.com

On 2013-09-08 1:25 PM, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
>> Access to the raw output would have made it possible to determine
>> that the random numbers were in fact generated by the physical
>> process described, since it is hard and would cost a lot of silicon
>> to simulate the various subtle offwhite characteristics of a well
>> described actual physical process.
> I am extremely skeptical of this claim.

Intel shows a circuit that should in theory output near random bits.
If the bits are actually coming from this circuit, we would expect to
see some long term anti correlation - an unusually long stream of
zeros should have a higher than random percent chance of being
followed by an unusually long stream of ones, and some short term
correlation - a zero should have a higher than fifty percent chance of
being followed by another zero, and a lower than fifty percent chance
of being followed by a one.

If we don't see that, we are not getting the raw unwhitened output, or
there is no hardware true randomness for us to get.

Conversely, if we do see that, we can be pretty sure that the circuit
exists and is producing true randomness, though of course we don't
know if that true randomness is necessarily being fed into the
whitener.  But then we don't need to use the output of the whitener,
we can feed the off white output into a software whitener.
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