Provably Secure Randomness Generation from Switching Probability of Magnetic Tunnel Junctions

Abstract

In recent years, true random number generators (TRNGs) based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) have become increasingly attractive. This is because MTJ-based TRNGs offer some advantages over traditional CMOS-based TRNGs, such as smaller area and simpler structure. However, there has been no work thus far that has quantified the quality of the raw output of a MTJ-based TRNG and performed suitable randomness extraction to produce provably secure random bits, unlike the case for CMOS-based TRNGs. In the work presented here, we implement a MTJ-based TRNG and characterize the entropy of the raw output. Using this information, we perform postprocessing to extract a set of random bits that are provably secure.