A Secured Key Generation Scheme Using Enhanced Entropy

Summary This paper is an efficient and secure way to generate true random numbers. With an ever increasing repertoire of applications that incorporate Randomness, there arises a need to ensure that the Randomness is truly Random at all tenable circumstances. Through this paper we formulate a method to generate true random numbers by collecting entropy from devices such as mouse, keyboard and hard disk. Here, rather than using the data supplied by the user we concentrate on the timestamps generated by the user interaction which is an efficient way of generating the random numbers. The time stamps that are collected are stored in a separate text file. While processing, the contents of this text file is XOR’ed with the contents of another file whose contents include the current state of the system and the usage of the system by the user. The output from the XOR function is now given as input to the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), a one-way hashing algorithm that gives an output of 160 bits. This output is written in a separate file which is the entropy pool, from which the key of required length is retrieved as per the requirement of the application. The random numbers that are being used at present are generated by hardware random number generators which are almost costly and infeasible for many situations, one area where the random number generators using “entropy” gain an edge. Experimental results show that this method generates in an efficient manner, true random numbers which can be applied for long term key generation, seeding cryptographic random numbers used by websites hosting online poker games and seeding pseudo random numbers for statistical testing.