Making a hardware random number generator

If you want a really good source of random numbers, you should get a hardware generator. But there’s not a lot of great options out there, and most people looking into this get (understandably) paranoid about backdoors. But, there’s a nice trick: if you combine multiple random sources together with xor, it doesn’t matter if one is backdoored, as long as they aren’t all backdoored. There are some exceptions–if the backdoor is actively looking at the output, it can still break your system. But as long as you’re just generating some random pads, instead of making a kernel entropy pool, you’re fine with this trick.

So! We just need a bunch of sources of randomness. Here’s the options I’ve tried:

• /dev/urandom (40,000KB/s) – this is nearly a pseudo-random number generator, so it’s not that good. But it’s good to throw in just in case. [Learn about /dev/random vs /dev/urandom if you haven’t. Then unlearn it again.]
• random-stream (1,000 KB/s), an implementation of the merenne twister pseudo-random-number generator. A worse version of /dev/urandom, use that unless you don’t trust the Linux kernel for some reason.
• infnoise (20-23 KB/s), a USB hardware random number generator. Optionally whitens using keccak. Mine is unfortunately broken (probably?) and outputs “USB read error” after a while
• OneRNG (55 KiB/s), a USB hardware random number generator. I use a custom script which outputs raw data instead of the provided scripts (although they look totally innocuous, do recommend
• /dev/hwrng (123 KB/s), which accesses the hardware random number generator built into the raspberry pi. this device is provided by the raspbian package rng-tools. I learned about this option here
• rdrand-gen (5,800 KB/s), a command-line tool to output random numbers from the Intel hardware generator instruction, RDRAND.

At the end, you can use my xor program to combine the streams/files. Make sure to use limit the output size if using files–by default it does not stop outputting data until EVERY file ends. The speed of the combined stream is at most going to be the slowest component (plus a little slowdown to xor everything). Here’s my final command line:

#!/bin/bash
# Fill up the folder with 1 GB one-time pads. Requires 'rng-tools' and a raspberry pi. Run as sudo to access /dev/hwrng.
while true; do
  sh onerng.sh | dd bs=1K count=1000000 of=tmp-onerng.pad 2>/dev/null
  infnoise --raw | dd bs=1K count=1000000 of=tmp-infnoise.pad 2>/dev/null
  xor tmp-onerng.pad tmp-infnoise.pad /dev/urandom /dev/hwrng | dd bs=1K count=1000000 of=/home/pi/pads/1GB-`\date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S`.pad 2>/dev/null;
done

Great, now you have a good one-time-pad and can join ok-mixnet 🙂

P.S. If you really know what you’re doing and like shooting yourself in the foot, you could try combining and whitening entropy sources with a randomness sponge like keccak instead.