Bipolar Junction Effects for High Entropy Data Harvesters

Harvesting high-entropy data from hardware generators is usually a difficult task and most of the applications will take data that is believed to contain enough entropy and use it to ldquoseedrdquo a cryptographic algorithm. The paper proposes an evaluation of such system on chip device designed to harvest high-entropy data from thermal phenomena (thermal noise and avalanche noise) and to analyze ldquowhiteningrdquo algorithms for reducing bias and correlation. Taking into account the features of system on chip devices: complete user management of analog and digital embedded resources, the possibility of creating custom peripherals and the high level of re-usability not only for the software modules but also for embedded hardware peripherals, the new design addresses the main challenges for building true random number generators and proposes a design path and a testing procedure for high-entropy generators.