Random Number Generator Based on Hydrogen Gas Sensor for Security Applications

Cryptographic applications need high-quality random number generator (RNG) for strong security and privacy measures. This paper presents RNG based on a hydrogen gas sensor that is fabricated by using microfabrication techniques. The proposed approach extracts the thermal noise information as an entropy source from the gas sensor that is non-deterministic during its operation and using hash function SHA-256 as post-processing. This non-deterministic noise is then processed to acquire a random number set fulfilling the NIST 800-22 statistical randomness test suite and it demonstrates that a gas sensor based RNG can provide high-quality random numbers. Secure data transfer is possible by having this method directly without any other hardware where hydrogen gas sensor needs to be used such as petrochemical field, fuel cells, and nuclear reactors.