Random Number Generator Based on Miniature Microbial Fuel Cells

Abstract

Random number generators (RNG) are important hardware primitives for many fields including secure communication, cryptology, weather forecast, gambling that needs unpredictable and non-deterministic random bit sequences. Various entropy sources are available to generate random numbers and generation rate depends on the application that needs to use random numbers. In this work, a new approach is given to generate random bits based on miniature microbial fuel cells that convert electrochemical energy into electricity. Microorganisms inside of the microbial fuel cell play a critical role to generate electricity therefore it is unpredictable what they will produce. An output voltage generated by the microbial fuel cells used to produce random bits then it was shown that they were successfully passed the NIST 800-22 statistical randomness tests after the XOR corrector post-processing method. The proposed approach can be especially used in environmental applications that need secure data transfer and bioreactors that have to securely send critical data to headquarter.