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A STANDARDS COMPLIANT ENTROPY SOURCE WITH A FAST ON-THE-FLY ENTROPY DEGRADATION DETECTION AND CORRECTION
Since the advent of technology and world digitalization, most human interaction relies on data exchange through cloud servers on the internet. However, with the innovation also arose concerns about users' privacy and vulnerability. Therefore, cryptography and authentication are essential to protect users' data so only the owner and trusted parties can access it. The security system is the module responsible for securing data inside the devices. The hardware root of trust dwells inside the security system module. True random number generators are the most crucial root of trust devices since they generate the encryption keys. A weak key gives an advantage to an intruder to quickly break the cryptography and steal the data. However, true random number generators are powered by entropy sources susceptible to voltage, temperature, and process variation, which degrades the key entropy. This work proposes an all-digital reconfigurable entropy source with a dual-mode digital processing unit for entropy degradation detection and correction. The processing unit is powered by a subset of statistical tests from the national institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), which detect and recover the entropy source output entropy within 1.5ms, 15 to 525x faster than similar works. Measured results show that the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) entropy source yields random bits at a throughput of 1Mb/s with a min-entropy of 0.993 bits at 0.8V. The design consumes up to 42.6μW and occupies an area of 2834μm2 (without the on-chip register bank). Moreover, both the ASIC and the field programable array (FPGA) implementations passed all the NIST and BSI certification testing procedures