Secure Chaotic Random Number Generator

Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNGs) play a pivotal role in generating key sequences of cryptographic protocols. The cryptographic system’s security depends upon the randomness of the random number generator, it’s unpredictability and its regeneracy. PUF has been used from a long time to generate random numbers and the benefit of using PUF as RNG is that it cannot be cloned and thus the random numbers cannot be regenerated on other system. But in the current scenario the PUFs can be modeled and are susceptible to emulation and man-in-the-middle attack. Among different schemes, a simple Chaotic Pseudo Random Number Generator (CPRNG) exhibits the property of being extremely sensitive to the initial seed and hence unpredictable. But, CPRNG is vulnerable if the initial seed is known. We propose a novel PUF based Chaotic PRNG (PUF-CPRNG) where the initial seed is secured by generating it from PUF. To further secure the PUF-CPRNG the feedback values of chaos are also fed from PUF. Hardware architecture for the proposed methodology has been designed and proof of concept implementation was carried out using Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The random numbers generated from this design passes all the NIST statistical tests. The periodicity of the generated numbers has been checked by running correlation tests between the generated numbers to demonstrate their validity. The designed CPRNG has been implemented and synthesized with Verilog HDL, using Xilinx ISE simulator and the results have been collected doing post-route simulation in Xilinx ISE using Virtex FPGA