Note: The TL100 has been discontinued. TectroLabs recommends the SwiftRNG.
The TL100 is a general purpose device that generates true hardware random numbers at a rate of 1.4 Mbits per second. Random bytes are downloaded from the TL100 through a USB interface using a simple API. The software with complete source code and all necessary USB driver-related files are supplied with the device and can also be downloaded.
What it is
The TL100 is a general purpose device that generates true (hardware) random numbers at a rate of 1.4 Mbits per second. Random bytes are downloaded from the TL100 through a USB interface using a simple API. The software download utility with a complete source code and all necessary USB driver-related files are supplied with the device on a DVD.
How it works
The TL100 utilizes random noise generated from four independent and reliable sources based on reverse-biased Zener diodes. The electrical noise generated by each random source is independently amplified, filtered and converted using ADC into digital values as bytes. Every three random bytes generated by different sources are used to produce one low bias random byte by applying XOR logical operation. To further reduce the bias, the resulting bytes are hashed as part of a post processing step that produces true random bytes.
More information
The TL100 implements an embedded health check test (HCT) that continuously monitors the quality of the random noise sources immediately after the electrical noise is digitized and before any further processing. In addition to running the HCT, the monitoring logic will check the quality of the final random bytes produced by continuously running the tests ‘Repetition Count Test’ and ‘Adaptive Proportion Test.’ The monitoring logic puts the device in ‘stop’ mode and flashes the LED light if it detects an unexpected deviation from normal operation or complete miss functioning of any of the four sources.
When the TL100 is first connected through a USB interface, the monitoring logic will run ‘HCT,’ ‘Repetition Count Test’ and ‘Adaptive Proportion Test’ on random bytes as part of the start-up test suite for about 10 seconds before the device will be ready to accept any requests. The monitoring logic will put the device in ‘stop’ mode and will flash the LED if any test failures are detected.
The TL100 contains patented technology.
Statistical tests
The TL100 device passes the following statistical tests for measuring the quality of a random number generators: ‘diehard’, NIST and ‘dieharder’.