IP Cores, Inc. Announces NIST SP800-90B Update for Its True Random IP Cores

Palo Alto, CA -- May 06, 2014 -- IP Cores, Inc. (http://www.ipcores.com) announces compact version of its true random IP cores compliant with the new revisions of the NIST SP800-90Arev1, SP800-90B, SP800-90C.

“Our true random generator IP cores are in high demand among leading ASIC and FPGA designers looking for a non-deterministic random bit generator (NRBG) for use in cryptographic applications; its health test capabilities always exceeded the NIST SP800-90 requirements, including the ones in the upcoming NIST SP800-90B document,” said Dmitri Varsanofiev, CTO of IP Cores, Inc. “However, since the SP800-90B mandates simpler tests, the validation of the TRNG1 can be streamlined with more compact entropy test engine.”

True Random Number Generators

True Random Number Generators (TRNG) are critical security blocks typically utilized to generate random numbers for secret cryptographic keys as well as seeds for pseudo-random number generators. A good-quality random number generator is essential for security, since generating the keys from a poor random source will significantly reduce the entropy of the long keys and might allow a brute-force attack on the seed used to generate the key. A typical embedded application usually does not have access to high-quality randomness sources, so a designer of a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) targeting such application might want to instantiate a true-random source on the chip.

Many TRNG designs rely exclusively on physical features (ring oscillators or metastability) that require awareness and caution from the back-end designer doing placement and routing. IP cores, Inc. in its TRNG1 design has avoided the potential sources of these problems thus allowing the back-end processing with little or no extra effort spent on TRNG1. Innovative design of the entropy source requires practically no special handling during the physical design stages. As an example, a typical FPGA instantiation of the TRNG1 requires no special scripts or tool configuration whatsoever.

TRNG1 is based on the CTR_DRBG design and thus avoids problems recently discovered in the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm.

Additional information about TRNG1 can be found on the IP Cores, Inc. web site, http://ipcores.com/True_Random_Generator_TRNG_IP_core.htm

NIST SP800-90 Revision

Random number generation is covered by multiple standards, with most popular being AIS 20/31 and NIST SP 800-90. The original SP 800-90 publications are currently being replaced by the new SP 800-90A, SP 800-90B and SP 800-90C documents.

About IP Cores, Inc.

IP Cores is a rapidly growing California company in the field of security, error correction, and DSP IP cores. Founded in 2004, the company provides hardware IP cores for communications and storage fields, including AES-based ECB/CBC/OCB/CFB, AES-GCM and AES-XTS cores, MACsec 802.1AE, IPsec and SSL/TLS protocol processors, flow-through AES/CCM cores with header parsing for IEEE 802.11 (WiFi), 802.16e (WiMAX), 802.15.3 (MBOA), 802.15.4 (Zigbee), public-key accelerators for RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), true random number generators (TRNG), cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators (CS PRNG), secure SHA and MD5 cryptographic hashes, lossless data compression cores, low-latency fixed and floating-point FFT and IFFT cores, as well as cyclic, Reed-Solomon, LDPC, BCH and Viterbi forward error correction (FEC) decoder cores.