New Entropy Source for Cryptographic Modules Using OpenMP in Multicore CPUs

Generating random numbers with high entropy plays an important role in cryptography. The security of a modern cryptosystem can be proved under the assumption that the system uses a reliable random number generator in general. However, it is difficult to implement a module with sufficiently qualified...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational Journal of Security and Its Applications Vol. 7; no. 4; pp. 445 - 452
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 30.07.2013
Subjects
Race condition
Entropy source
OpenMP
Cryptographic modules
Random number generation
Parallel program
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Summary:Generating random numbers with high entropy plays an important role in cryptography. The security of a modern cryptosystem can be proved under the assumption that the system uses a reliable random number generator in general. However, it is difficult to implement a module with sufficiently qualified entropy sources in its random number generators. With trends to move to lightweight devices from desktop PCs, cryptographic modules have suffered from the lack of good sources of randomness. As another trend, parallel computing techniques have become popular very rapidly to achieve better performance. In this paper, we suggest a method for generating entropy source using parallel computations with OpenMP. Also, we verify the experimental results based on the min-entropy estimation and conclude that a new source of randomness can be obtained from the race conditions in multicore environments.
ISSN:1738-9976