Hardware random number generator

Crivens · Mar 5, 2024

ogogon said:
I believe that your salaries there have either increased significantly, or Boeings have become much cheaper...

I think the latter. You can get plane parts for free these days (or so I was told).

entropySource · Mar 6, 2024

SirDice said:
Does it work on FreeBSD? If not, why are you posting here?

It can work on FreeBSD, just using FTDI USB chip. And freeBSD can support pyftdi

lgrant · Friday at 6:23 PM

Assuming you have enough of a driver to read from your hardware random number device, could it be as simple as starting a task early on that uses dd to copy from the device to /dev/random? I'm a little shaky on the details of FreeBSD I/O yet, so this may be crazy, but it would seem like the write would block with FreeBSD didn't want any more entropy, and the read would block when the hardware device didn't have any more to give at the moment.

bakul · Friday at 6:52 PM

random(4) has some details. Plus see

Random number generation: An illustrated primer

Last week we learned (from two different sources!) that certain RSA implementations don’t properly seed their random number generators before generating keys. One practical upshot is that a n…

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

And here is an old paper:

An implementation of the Yarrow PRNG for FreeBSD :: FreeBSD Presentations and Papers

papers.freebsd.org

bob2112 · 2026-02-10T17:12:37+0000

External hardware generators are snake oil imo. The only real need for a hardware generator is in some, mostly old, embedded, systems. None of these cases justify an external generator.

POSIX.1 · 2026-02-10T17:54:14+0000

bob2112 I sincerely hope that all the foolish villains of this world accept your advice without verification and completely uncritically.

I congratulate you on this low-quality contribution.

drhowarddrfine · 2026-02-10T19:51:27+0000

Decades ago, Byte magazine had an article on building a noise generator that fed into a computer for giving a random number. Someone can search for that. Probably before 2000 but not sure.
Another article I read where the time it took between keypresses for someone on the keyboard

tingo · 2026-02-10T20:06:27+0000

This project is available https://www.crowdsupply.com/leetronics/infinite-noise-trng
and supposedly has open source software which works on FreeBSD https://www.crowdsupply.com/13-37/i.../free-entropy-service-libinfnoise-and-openssl

FreeBSD and macOS support · Issue #8 · leetronics/infnoise

Is there any plan to support FreeBSD or macOS? FYI, I've removed the Linux-dependent part and fix the Makefile for the FreeBSD libraries and the code seems to be working fine for FreeBSD 11.2-STABL...

github.com

but it looks like work has stopped

GitHub - jj1bdx/infnoise-freebsd: Infinity Noise TRNG Program for FreeBSD

Infinity Noise TRNG Program for FreeBSD. Contribute to jj1bdx/infnoise-freebsd development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

GitHub - jj1bdx/freebsd-dev-trng: An entropy injection device driver for FreeBSD

An entropy injection device driver for FreeBSD. Contribute to jj1bdx/freebsd-dev-trng development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

kent_dorfman766 · 2026-02-10T21:22:31+0000

I think that for all but the most esoteric applications, an entropy gathering system that can be used to seed a high-end PRNG is adequate. ie collect operating system "noise" and use it to seed mersenne-twister with long period...and use that entropy to reseed the PRNG frequently. That would foil attempts to determine the sequence starting point. I mean the twister has an astronomically long recycle period that makes it relatively secure.

I hate referring to Linux, but their /dev/random entropy system does quite nicely...and if that isn't good enough then the diode avalanche breakdown is good for generating entropy, and some Intel motherboards even embedded such devices for that purpose.

kent_dorfman766 · 2026-02-10T21:28:51+0000

drhowarddrfine said:
Decades ago, Byte magazine had an article on building a noise generator that fed into a computer for giving a random number. Someone can search for that. Probably before 2000 but not sure.
Another article I read where the time it took between keypresses for someone on the keyboard

Keyboard and mouse interrupt data is part of the Linux /dev/random entropy generation.

atax1a · 2026-02-10T23:06:32+0000

the freebsd entropy generation uses Schneier's Fortuna. Unless your hardware is extremely impoverished, we would argue that a hardware RNG is unnecessary in this day and age.

blackbird9 · 2026-02-10T23:12:30+0000

Radioactive decay is inherently truely random at the quantum process level, and can be used to generate random numbers by means of some some decay event detection and counting/timing hardware. For some low cost examples and description of the principles involved, see here:- https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ and here https://karstenschuhl.com/random-generator. I expect if you have money you can buy commercial versions.

There is another interesting site here https://www.random.org/ , and this accompanying project which derives random numbers from atmospheric noise https://github.com/therealOri/atmos-rng?tab=readme-ov-file

Hardware random number generator

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