Hardware random number generator for FPGAs
Rautanoppa implements a basic HWRNG in Verilog, by combining the outputs of ring oscillators. With a sufficient number of them, the natural jitter produces a random stream of bits that passes the FIPS 140-2 test, as used in rng-tools. The bitstream is output via RS-232 serial port.
The serial port (UART) code is adapted verbatim from https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner. A USB-serial adapter and/or TTL level signals can be used instead of a traditional RS-232 port.
- Digilent Nexys2 / Xilinx Spartan 3E 500k
- Terasic DE2-115 / Altera Cyclone IV 4CE115
The bulk of the code is the same in both cases. The necessary differences between these implementations are mainly due to
- Clock management (Altera PLL / Xilinx DCM)
- Debug display
It should be trivial to port these to other Xilinx or Altera boards with suitable I/O. The clock management code may vary between different chip families (e.g. this DCM might not work on a Virtex).
For Linux/unix, a test script is provided. It requires the rng-tools package. The script sets up the computer's serial port and runs rngtest. After a succesful test, you can use rngd from the same package to import the randomness into your system entropy pool.
Once rngd is running, you can cat /dev/random to check that it works. It is generally quite slow if there are no hardware randomness sources, only a few characters per second on average, but this device should give you a flood of random chars.
cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail is another way to monitor the overall picture of randomness sources and sinks.
The serial port is easily maxed out at the default 115200 baud, producing about 90 Kibits/s for rngd. This is similar to the rate of TPM hardware, and the effect on /dev/random output is drastic. The code should work on higher baud rates, but may require tweaking to maintain the quality of randomness.
The reset button is not really necessary in my experience. Its main purpose, in fact, is to provide a signal that cannot be optimized away, so it could be connected to any unused I/O port.
The quality of randomness depends on the FPGA model as well as the bitstream synthesis. There may even be variations across individual FPGAs of the same model. Generally, you should try to vary NUM_RINGOSCS until a working value is found. A bigger value is not necessarily better, though...
The Nexys2 version, in particular, is very sensitive to changes in NUM_RINGOSCS and even the display code. My hypothesis is that the ring oscillators are picking up nearby electromagnetic noise, and locking on to a pattern (although the individual oscillators, being of different lengths, cannot all have the same actual frequencies).
This is exacerbated by the fact that the display code in Nexys2 is more involved and uses a number of frequencies, compared to the simple wiring in the DE2-115.
Since 2015-05-07 the display part is optional to build. It is mainly useful for basic debugging, and the randomness tests can be done via serial once basic operation works. Note that the Xilinx version needs a different UCF for the display variant.
A single FPGA can easily serve independent portions of entropy to multiple computers. Here the same engine is used with several output ports. This is possible because the production rate is roughly 100 times the speed of a typical UART. The ports are fed round-robin from this source, and no byte is sent twice.
As the same logic applies to single-port devices, these are now built from the same code with NUM_PORTS = 1, which is the default. For a dual-port DE2-115, (un)comment hwrandom.qsf accordingly.
The above issues still apply: you may need to tweak NUM_RINGOSCS to pass rngtest, and the optimal number is likely different from the single-port case.
Due to this construction, any correlation between the outputs is as good or bad as that within a single output stream. There is no guarantee of cryptographically acceptable randomness, but it may well be possible, it simply takes more testing.
'Rautanoppa' is Finnish for 'iron dice' or 'hardware dice'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_oscillator
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/fips140.txt -- Specifies the test used by rng-tools
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards/s3estarter/files/s3esk_frequency_counter.pdf -- Ring oscillator implementation on page 9
http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-790.ps -- includes statistical analysis on the randomness produced this way