How random is random?

By EETimes

January 4, 2012

The other day I came across an interesting product announcement from IP Cores Inc. It was for their True Random Number Generator (TRNG).

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 that generated 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.

That got me to thinking about randomness, which happens in my brain every now and then. How random can a machine be?

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