A UK company called Simtec Electronics has created a USB thumb drive device with dedicated hardware for producing a continuous stream of high entropy bits, suitable for mixing into an existing entropy pool on your device or feeding directly into applications and protocols that require sources of randomness. The product is called Entropy Key and and can be ordered from the website for £36.00, with further discounts for bulk orders
An overview of the process for producing the entropy is given in the diagram below. There are two independent noise generators based on P-N junctions that are sampled at a high rate to produce a stream of bytes. The output of each generator and their XOR are subjected to the universal statistical bit test devised by Ueli Maurer. If the sequences pass this test then von Neumann’s debias trick is applied, and then another round of universal testing, followed by hashing with Skein. This process blocks at any stage if the computed statistics fall outside conservative estimates of the properties of random generators.
These steps are repeated until 20,000 bit have been collected, upon which the statistical tests recommended by FIPS 140-2 are applied. The 20,000 bit pool is then parcelled into blocks of 256 bits, and Simtec estimates that each such bock has been generated from about 5,000 bits of noisy hardware samples.
There is quite a reliance on Maurer’s universal statistical bit test, and perhaps justifiably so since this test is specifically designed to detect deviations from expected statistical properties in a bit generator by computing an estimate of the generator’s entropy using ideas from universal data compression algorithms. The test is quite simple, and there is a reasonable description and parameterization given in NIST SP-800 22, which also contains a description of a large number of other statistical tests. A research paper on a finer analysis of Maurer’s test can be found here.
The output rate is, by its nature, variable but an average rate of more than 30 kilobits per second is expected. The complete client daemon source is provided under an MIT license which means everyone is free to examine the code for themselves. SimTec also notes that the Entropy Key can automatically detect various different physical attacks, such as temperature changes (by using a built-in temperature sensor), and opening of the case. The device is currently undergoing testing with "select customers” but is available for general ordering. There is an IRC channel #ekey on the oftc network if you want to discuss any of this further.
(Thanks to Vincent Sanders for providing some more technical details)
Posts
