Lightweight High-Throughput True Random Number Generator Based on State Switchable Ring Oscillator

Abstract

True random number generators (TRNGs) perform an extremely critical role in cryptographic algorithms and security protocols, scientific simulation, industrial testing, privacy protection, and numerous other domains. Nevertheless, modern TRNGs have difficulty striking a reasonable balance between high throughput and low hardware consumption. In this paper, a novel lightweight high-throughput TRNG based on state switchable ring oscillators (SSROs) is proposed. Under the effect of flip-flops that are prone to entering the metastable region, the SSROs randomly switch between oscillatory and buffer states to create jitter and metastability. A feedback strategy is adopted to effectively eliminate the fixed point in the circuit, which further enhances the randomness of the structure. The proposed TRNG is implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 and Kintex-7 FPGAs, with support for automatic routing. It achieves a throughput of up to 400 Mbps while consuming only 16 LUTs and 13 DFFs, showing extremely high resource utilization efficiency. Experimental results show that the output random sequence passes the NIST SP800-22 test, the NIST SP800-90B test, and the AIS-31 test without any post-processing, exhibiting strong robustness against voltage and temperature variations as well as frequency injection attacks.