Random number generation based on polarization mode noise of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

Abstract

We propose an implementation of random number generation based on the measurement of polarization mode noise in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL). By measuring the phase difference between two laser beams with perpendicular polarization directions, a 40 Gbps generation speed is achieved with a simple post-processing method. The random sequence we generated passes both the standard statistical test suites (Diehard and NIST-STS) and 3σ criterion. Our setup is compact and easy for implementation, and it also has a better efficiency in extracting randomness from VCSEL compared with existing methods.

Generation of multi-channel high-speed physical random numbers originated from two chaotic signals of mutually coupled semiconductor lasers

“…However, the requirement of complete unpredictability is unrealistic since the sequence can always be determined given the initial conditions of the algorithm [5]. On the contrary, the generation of PRN relies on stochastic physical processes such as thermal noise, quantum fluctuations and frequency jitter of oscillators, etc [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”