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The ability to generate secure random numbers is fundamental to the security of cryptographic protocols. Random Number Generators (RNGs) start to appear in recent modern Intel CPUs as used in desktops and servers. Solutions for embedded devices, such as e.g. sensor nodes and wireless routers, are still severely lacking however.

In this paper we present the implementation of a secure pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) for the ARM Cortex-M microcontroller family, one of the most popular embedded platforms at this moment. For compactness and compatibility reasons, our implementation is software only. It uses the start-up values of on-chip SRAM as random seed and uses the Keccak hash function for both entropy extraction as well as pseudo-random number generation.

Getting Keccak very compact in terms of memory requirements is therefore essential. Keccak is a tunable algorithm: in this paper …