Abstract
Randomness lays the foundation for information security. Quantum random number generation based on various quantum principles has been proposed to provide true randomness in the last two decades. We integrate four different types of quantum random number generators on the Alibaba Cloud servers to enhance cybersecurity. Post-processing modules are integrated into the quantum platform to extract true random numbers. We employ improved authentication protocols where original pseudo-random numbers are replaced with quantum ones. Users from the Alibaba Cloud, such as Ant Financial and Smart Access Gateway, request random numbers from the quantum platform for various cryptographic tasks. For cloud services demanding the highest security, such as Alipay at Ant Financial, we combine the random numbers from four quantum devices by XOR the outputs to enhance practical security. The quantum platform has been continuously run for more than a year.
Highlights
Random numbers play an important role in cybersecurity, cryptography, lottery, and scientific simulations[1,2,3]
Due to the dead time of single-photon detectors, such Quantum random number generators (QRNGs) usually have a limited speed of Mbps, while phase-fluctuation ones[30,31,32,33] in Fig. 1(b) can dramatically increase the generation speed up to Gbps using traditional photodetectors
The major advantage of the QRNG platform over the other ones is it can avoid the loopholes of predictable random numbers
Summary
Random numbers play an important role in cybersecurity, cryptography, lottery, and scientific simulations[1,2,3]. Poor implementations of randomness generation would open up serious security loopholes for cryptosystems even when the underlying algorithms are secure[6,7,8,9,10]. Even for those newly proposed lattice or hashed-based quantum-safe cryptography algorithms, randomness is still a fundamental problem that cannot be solved with classical means. The ability to provide high-quality, high-speed, and stable random number services is an essential demand for information security today[11,12]
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