Abstract
Real random numbers produced by a physical process are important for many applications in cryptography. This report presents a mechanism for collecting random numbers based on physical noise sources in a standard hard disk drive. We apply statistical tests to show that high quality random numbers can be produced at a speed of up to 835,200 bits/s. As this process can be implemented on any Maxtor disk drive in a standard PC, no additional hardware is needed to obtain these numbers. A US-patent is pending.
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Notes
The standard deviation σ of our binary variable with p=1/2 is 1/2. Thus we obtain for the standard deviation σ n of the average of n bits
$$ \sigma _n = \frac{\sigma } {{\sqrt n }} = \frac{{1/2}} {{\sqrt {1.44 \cdot 10^8 } }} = 4.166 \times 10^{ - 5} $$
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to FH Ravensburg-Weingarten, University of Applied Sciences for granting a sabbatical and to Maxtor for the financial support and for providing a very efficient and motivating scientific environment. We owe special thanks to our Maxtor colleagues Robert Kimball, Bruce Schardt and Lloyd Levy.
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Schreck, E., Ertel, W. Disk drive generates high speed real random numbers. Microsyst Technol 11, 616–622 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-005-0532-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-005-0532-6