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Entropy harvesting from physical sensors

Published: 17 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Finding entropy sources is a major issue to design non-deterministic random generators for headless devices. Our goal is to evaluate a collection of sensors (e.g. thermometer, accelerometer, magnetometer) as potential sources of entropy. A challenge in the analysis of these sources is the estimation of min-entropy. We have followed the NIST recommendations to obtain pessimistic estimations from the dataset collected during our campaign of experiments. The most interesting sensors of our study are: the accelerometer, the magnetometer, the vibration sensor and the internal clock. Contrary to previous results, we observe far less entropy than it was expected before. Other sensors which measures phenomena with high inertia such as the temperature or air pressure provide very little entropy.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WiSec '13: Proceedings of the sixth ACM conference on Security and privacy in wireless and mobile networks
April 2013
230 pages
ISBN:9781450319980
DOI:10.1145/2462096
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 17 April 2013

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Author Tags

  1. entropy sources
  2. min-entropy

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WiSec '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 70 submissions, 37%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 338 submissions, 29%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Real Random Number Generation by Chemical Reactions Based on Quantum Wave EquationBilgisayar Bilimleri ve Teknolojileri Dergisi10.54047/bibted.15442045:2(47-58)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2024
  • (2024)A novel information entropy approach for crack monitoring leveraging nondestructive evaluation sensingMechanical Systems and Signal Processing10.1016/j.ymssp.2024.111207214(111207)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2023)An Evaluation On The Entropy Supplying Capability Of Smartphone SensorsThe Computer Journal10.1093/comjnl/bxad08167:4(1550-1563)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
  • (2021)Sensor-Based Entropy Source Analysis and Validation for Use in IoT EnvironmentsElectronics10.3390/electronics1010117310:10(1173)Online publication date: 14-May-2021
  • (2021)Efficient Programmable Random Variate Generation Accelerator From Sensor NoiseIEEE Embedded Systems Letters10.1109/LES.2020.300700513:3(73-76)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2021)Generation of True Random Numbers using Entropy Sources Present within Portable Computers2021 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Computing and Communication Technologies (CONECCT)10.1109/CONECCT52877.2021.9622734(1-6)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Random Number Generator Using Sensors for DroneIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29729588(30343-30354)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)True Random Number Generator (TRNG) Utilizing FM Radio Signals for Mobile and Embedded Devices in Multi-Access Edge ComputingSensors10.3390/s1919413019:19(4130)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2019
  • (2018)TRNG (True Random Number Generator) Method Using Visible Spectrum for Secure Communication on 5G NetworkIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.27996826(12838-12847)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2017)Accelerometer and Fuzzy Vault-Based Secure Group Key Generation and Sharing Protocol for Smart WearablesIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2017.270869012:10(2467-2482)Online publication date: Oct-2017
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