Industry Expert Blogs

Cryptography depends on entropy. More specifically, every cryptographic protocol requires a source of non-deterministic (random) data to seed its security algorithms. While entropy is everywhere and, per the second law of thermodynamics, always increasing, it is exceedingly hard to create an unpredictable, statistically independent, uniformly distributed and protected source of data. In other words, creating a true random number generator is quite the feat.

Demonstrating that one has successfully done so requires rigorous proof. To that end, NIST developed the Special Publication (SP) 800-90 series of standards for the construction and validation of Random Bit Generators (RBGs). As NIST describes in the scope of these publications, the SP 800-90 series “provide a basis of validation by NIST’s Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) and Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP)” for FIPS 140-2 and FIPS 140-3 certification.

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