Fast random number generator based on optical physical unclonable functions
This work addresses the need for high-speed random number generation in applications like cryptography, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing optical PUF schemes.
The authors tackled the problem of generating random numbers quickly by using homemade optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) illuminated with modulated laser wavefronts to produce speckle patterns, achieving a rate of 0.96 Gbit/s with verified randomness, which is significantly faster than prior optical-PUF-based methods.
We propose an approach for fast random number generation based on homemade optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs). The optical PUF is illuminated with input laser wavefront of continuous modulation to obtain different speckle patterns. Random numbers are fully extracted from speckle patterns through a simple post-processing algorithm. Our proof-of-principle experiment achieves total random number generation rate of 0.96 Gbit/s with verified randomness, which is far faster than previous optical-PUF-based schemes. Our results demonstrate that the presented random number generator (RNG) proposal has great potential to achieve ultrafast random number generation rate up to several hundreds of Gbit/s.