On Designing PUF-Based TRNGs with Known Answer Tests
Yang Yu, Elena Dubrova, Mats Näslund, Sha Tao · 2018
Random numbers are widely used in cryptographic algorithms and protocols. A faulty true random number generator (TRNG) may open a door into a system in spite of cryptographic protection. It is therefore important to design TRNGs so that they can be tested at different stages of their lifetime to assure their trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose a method for designing physical unclonable function (PUF)-based TRNGs which can be tested in-field by known answer tests. We present a prototype FPGA implementation of the proposed TRNG based on an arbiter PUF which passes all NIST 800-22 statistical tests and has the minimal entropy of 0.918 estimated according to NIST 800-90B recommendations. This is a nontrivial achievement given that arbiter PUFs are notoriously hard to place in a symmetric manner in FPGAs.