Hardware random number generator

[Crivens]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Radioactive decay is inherently truely random at the quantum process level, in the sense that is is impossible (within our current knowledge) to predict when a decay event will occur, and hence can be used to generate random numbers by means of 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. Sadly it appears John Walker has retired the decay version of 'hotbits' though, which is a shame.

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

 

[blackbird9]

Another similar project using radioactive decay, it should be fairly simple to adapt this to use with freebsd.

Generating True Random Numbers with a Geiger Counter and an ATtiny13 to serial port

Tweaks and instructions on a range of topics on arduinos, raspberry pi and medical technology and more

www.riyas.org

And an interesting thread here https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/177872/true-randomness-via-radioactive-decay

 

[gpw928]

If absolute trust is not an issue for seeding, I use the ANU's online Quantum Random Number Generator, which measures "the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum".

alias -x anuentropy="curl -k 'https://qrng.anu.edu.au/API/jsonI.php?length=1024&type=hex16&size=4' 2>/dev/null"

 

[MG]

If it must be as random as possible, what about radio noise as input? Never tried anything related. but a wifi-controller that's able to show binary receiver noise that's entirely unpredictable would be useable.
And a soundcard? Can we get highly amplified noise from the mic channel without anything connected to it? It may not like it but it might work. Maybe someone knows a trick...

 

[drhowarddrfine]

the freebsd entropy generation uses Schneier's Fortuna.

random(4)

man.freebsd.org

Fortuna - Schneier on Security

A secure pseudorandom number generator Designed by Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier About Fortuna What’s a PRNG? It’s a mechanism for generating random numbers on a computer. They’re called pseudorandom, because you can’t get truly random numbers from a completely non-random thing like a...

www.schneier.com

 

[Espionage724]

I used once some very old web camera for this. It was very bad camera - a lot of noise. Just capture raw image, concatenate with timestamp (higher resolution as possible), hash it, and use it as the key to encrypt something (/dev/zero or /dev/urandom output for instance), but not more than 4MB - then repeat.
If CPU is relatively good, there is /dev/hwrng as well.

That's what I'd do! Cloudflare's implementation is cool: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/

 

[blackbird9]

Another nice project using radioactive decay.

GitHub - nategri/chernobyl_dice: A quantum random number generator with a Cold War aesthetic.

A quantum random number generator with a Cold War aesthetic. - nategri/chernobyl_dice

github.com

And there are commercial pcie cards, eg vertex and quantis... but they probably do cost as much as a boeing wing
I seem to remember years ago there was a pci card with a built-in radiocactive source, but I cant remember the make, probably obsolete now anyway.