Characterization, evaluation and utilization of clock jitter as source of randomness in data security

This thesis, funded by the DGA, is motivated by the problem of evaluation of TRNG for applications with a very high level of security. As current standards such as AIS-31 are not sufficient for these types of applications, the DGA proposes a complementary procedure, validated on TRNG using ring oscillators (RO), which aims to characterize the source of randomness of TRNG in order to identify electronic noises present in it. These noises are manifested in the digital circuits by the clock jitter generated in the RO. They can be characterized by their power spectral density related to the time Allan variance which allows, unlike the standard variance which is still widely used, to discriminate these different types of noise (mainly thermal, flicker). This study was used as a basis for estimating the proportion of jitter due to thermal noise used in stochastic models describing the output of TRNG. In order to illustrate and validate the DGA certification approach on other principles of TRNG apart from RO, we propose a characterization of PLL as a source of randomness. We have modeled the PLL in terms of transfer functions. This modeling has led to the identification of the source of noise at the output of the PLL, as well as its nature as a function of the physical parameters of the PLL. This allowed us to propose recommendations on the choice of parameters to ensure maximum entropy. In order to help in the design of this type of TRNG, we also propose a tool to search for the non-physical parameters of the generator ensuring the best compromise between security and throughput.