68000 Motherboard User’s Manual
Rev. A
Page 35 of 54
The second is the empirically measured duty cycle of the tallied output. According to
Shannon’s definition of information, a bias in this state resulting in an uneven duty cycle
reduces the entropy contribution of the bit by the following.
!
S
=
"
p
n
log
p
n
( )
n
=
1
#
$
% "
D
&
log
2
D
( )
+
1
"
D
(
)
&
log
2
1
"
D
(
)
[
]
where S is the entropy contribution per sample expressed in bits,
and D is the duty cycle of the digital waveform.
It is worth noting that high lighting conditions may adversely affect the operation of this
entropy generator. Since the circuit relies on sporadic breakdown of a reverse biased
semiconductor junction, increased concentrations of electron-hole pairs spawned by
brightly lit conditions on the clear body of the germanium diode may reduce the
occurrence of these triggerable breakdown events.
Measurements for the estimate provided above are taken at 20°C ambient under typical
indoor lighting conditions and were roughly consistent across various circuit components
in bench test. The selection of any particular avalanche diode was the key driver
impacting the entropy generator’s performance. Of course, generating randomness is a
cryptic art, and in no way should this entropy source be considered ‘cryptologically
secure’ or even critically reliable.
Example output of the Hardware Entropy Generator is given below in Table 17 per the
high-speed sampling program snippet given in Table 16. The program was executed on
MB68k-100 hardware at 10.24MHz microprocessor clock speed, in ambient lighting and
at approximately 22°C. Differences observed primarily follow the selection of the
particular avalanche diode component. The results varied widely as different 1N34A
diodes were tested with all other components unchanged. Changes to other components
resulted in little impact.
Table 16: Entropy Sampler
MOVEA.L
#$400, A0
Set up the target address of the buffer into which to
write the samples.
MOVE.L
#$FB00, D7
Specify
the number of samples to take.
RANDSAMPLOOP:
Establish the loop start point.
MOVE.B
ONBD_SYNC, (A0)+
Capture a sample from the Hardware Entropy
Generator.
DBF
D7, RANDSAMPLOOP
Iterate through the loop until the specified number
of samples has been taken.
Summary of Contents for MB68k-100
Page 1: ...Rev A Grant K c 2011 ...