A Closer Look at the Delay-Chain based TRNG

This paper presents a refined stochastic model of the delay-chain based true random number generator (DC-TRNG) and its application. DC-TRNG is a true random number generator for FPGAs that utilizes time-to-digital conversion (TDC) to accurately determine the position of the ring-oscillator jittery signal edge. Our stochastic model employs precise time characterization of the carry-chains that are used for TDC in the DC-TRNG. In order to determine lower bounds of the estimated min-entropy, the binary probabilities are calculated by applying the stochastic model. Based on these computed probabilities, we perform optimizations of the DC-TRNG parameters on two different FPGAs — Xilinx Spartan 6 and Intel Cyclone IV, in order to achieve the highest possible throughput of the DC-TRNG.