OneRNG – Open Hardware Random Number Generator

• rtl-entropy

  3 345 10.0 C

  Discontinued An entropy generator using SDR peripherals, including rtl-sdr and BladeRF

• untwister

  3 352 10.0 C++

  Seed recovery tool for PRNGs

You are correct. However, history teaches us important lessons.

Back in the old days when cryptography was a weird concept nobody understood, we had the Linear Congruential Generator (LCG)[1] to generate pseudo random numbers. It looked random, so we used it.

Then some egghead said "give me a few outputs of your LCG and I can reverse it back to a seed"[2]. Oh damn! What do we do? The obvious solution: Reseed the RNG before you use it.

Then another egghead said "I've invented Mersenne Twister (MT). It is faster and more secure"[3]. So we switched to that. No need to reseed the RNG anymore!

But then someone said "We have broken MT. Take some numbers. Give it to this app, and it will give you the seed"[4]. And so we started to reseed the RNG again.

Today it is hash-chaining, XOR-shift and improved linear-feedback shift register algorithms.

Do you want to put your money on that we have now reached bug-free well-enough PRNGs that we no longer have fiddle with reseeding? It is a dangerous gamble. More than anything I wish we were clever enough to create robust, correctness proven and high-performance PRNGs so we could stop all this nonsense - but alas, here we are.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article/1/2/83/425243

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsaglia%27s_theorem

[3] http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/ARTICLES/mt.p...

[4] https://github.com/altf4/untwister

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• tillitis-key1

  9 379 8.5 Verilog

  Board designs, FPGA verilog, firmware for TKey, the flexible and open USB security key 🔑

  

Given a suitable app, the Tillitis Key 1 works as a RNG. I have written a first version, and will release one in the public app repository in a week or so.

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1-apps

• tkey-ssh-agent

  2 115 7.0 Go

  SSH Agent for TKey, the flexible open hardware/software USB security key 🔑

  

Given a suitable app, the Tillitis Key 1 works as a RNG. I have written a first version, and will release one in the public app repository in a week or so.

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1-apps

Suggest a related project