Exploiting DRAM Latency Variations for Generating True Random Numbers
This addresses the need for secure and efficient random number generation in security applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing DRAM-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of generating high-quality true random numbers from DRAM by exploiting latency variations, achieving robust performance across different conditions and acceptable speed in silicon tests on Samsung and Micron DDR3 modules.
True random number generator (TRNG) plays a vital role in a variety of security applications and protocols. The security and privacy of an asset rely on the encryption, which solely depends on the quality of random numbers. Memory chips are widely used for generating random numbers because of their prevalence in modern electronic systems. Unfortunately, existing Dynamic Random-access Memory (DRAM)-based TRNGs produce random numbers with either limited entropy or poor throughput. In this paper, we propose a DRAM-latency based TRNG that generates high-quality random numbers. The silicon results from Samsung and Micron DDR3 DRAM modules show that our proposed DRAM-latency based TRNG is robust (against different operating conditions and environmental variations) and acceptably fast.