Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by a-dub 1458 days ago
on the flip side, do newer embedded hardware designs have better sources of entropy and monotony yet? (does that still matter?)
1 comments

Yes, many more powerful chips include hardware RNGs now. ESP32 and STM32 and Atmel SAM have them at least. Some 16 bit ones like some MSP430s have them (and AES) too.

I don't think they're generally in 8-bitters unless some of the newer "big-little" ones throw one in, but probably most IoT devices that need cryptographic security would use a 32-bitter these days anyway if nothing else for the networking.

There are also devices like the ATECC608 which have an internal HRNG, and also provide offloaded security cryptographic signing based on that, which both saves a very small device burning cycles on crypto and also prevents a private key ever residing in the CPU.