Optical random number generation - harvesting entropy from noise and chaos

Abstract

Random number generators have become an essential part of our modern life, in ways that average consumers seldom appreciate. Much of modern communication and digital storage relies on cryptography to ensure privacy, security, and authentication. Random number generation is a critical process that underlies all of these methods. The rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth, storage, and computation, combined with the growing specter of cyberthreats ensure that our need for reliable and unpredictable random numbers will only grow in the future. Just as optics has become the dominant mode of digital communication, optical methods are being increasingly applied to the problem of random number generation. In this presentation, we review the current status of optical random number generation, and discuss the broader problem of harvesting and quantifying entropy in systems that combine noise and chaos.