Unpredictability is usually perceived with a sense of uneasiness and discomfort. However, when it comes to secure our data, information, posts, pictures and whatever flows to (or from) the internet about us, protection relies on unpredictability. The impossibility for an eavesdropper or a hacker to break the walls protecting what sits on the net about us depends on secret keys, protocols, cyphering algorithms namely the art & science of cryptography. Keys, essential to lock&unlock the doors, must be randomly generated. And true randomness implies unpredictability.
Random Power is addressing the development of a True Random Bit Generator for key generation and beyond and aims at providing a secure, cost effective, robust and tiny device for the IoT, automotive and mobile markets. It is based on a silicon device, with all of the advantages connected to the micro-electronics advances; the source of randomness is endogenous and this is a genuine paradigm shift with respect to existing devices, providing simplification and robustness of the system; last but not least, it is based on the quantum properties of matter and this guarantees an intrinsic and irreducible unpredictability of the events at the base of the random bit stream generation.
The genesis of the project is an example of ingenuity and serendipity and can be tracked to the effort of understanding random events affecting the response of state-of-the-art detectors of light with single photon sensitivity. The principle, protected by a patent application, has been qualified according to protocols developed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, using high level laboratory equipment.
Thanks to the ATTRACT project, it will exit the “comfort zone” of well-equipped research laboratories to design, produce and qualify a self-consistent device able to deliver million random bits per second to feed security protocols.