Random Number Generator Based on Fuel Cells

Abstract

Random number generators (RNG) are one of the most important building blocks of cryptosystems. Sensitive data are increasingly used in communication systems so generating unpredictable secret keys and random numbers play a significant role in cryptography for strong security and privacy measures. This paper presents RNG based on micro scale fuel cell array that is fabricated by using microfabrication techniques. A fuel cell converts the chemical energy into electricity by consuming the fuel such as hydrogen. Here, we use a microbial fuel cell to generate electricity and harvest the entropy during its operation then obtain strong random numbers from the generated electricity value after using hash function SHA-512 as post-processing. The NIST 800–22 statistical randomness test suite shows that fuel cells-based RNG can provide high-quality random numbers. This method provides secure data transfer directly without any other physical RNG where fuel cells needs to be used such as reactors, vehicles, portable electronic devices.