Design and testing of photon-based hardware random number generator.*

Hardware random number generators (HRNG) are widely used in the computer world for the security purposes as well as in the science world as a source of the high quality randomness for the models and simulations. Currently existing HRNG are either costly or very slow and of questionable quality. This work proposes a simple design of the HRNG based on the low-number photon absorption by a detector (a photo-multiplyer tube of a silicon-based one) that can provide a large volume of high quality random numbers. The different options of processing and the testing of quality of the generator output are presented.