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ID Quantique’s Quantis QRNG Chip receives NIST ESV Certification on IID Track

ID Quantique (IDQ) announced that its Quantis QRNG chips have just received NIST ESV certification on Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) entropy estimation track. This certification offers high attainable security level for generation of random bits. It makes IDQ’s range of QRNG chips ideal for all security applications and integration into devices for automotive, computing, critical infrastructure, IoT (internet of things), mobile and space communications to meet stringent security requirements.

Historically, randomness was mainly used in gaming industry. In computer age, this was extended to modeling and simulations. Since advent of internet, need for cyber security applications has increased, to secure data in transit and at rest via encryption. Generating securely high-quality randomness is a prerequisite for all cryptographic techniques. The increase of interconnected devices and exponentially growing volume of data generated and communicated makes cryptography ubiquitous, which in turn creates need for small, secure and high quality randomness sources.

Various governments have set up cryptographic validation programmes in order to allow users to assess practical security of and gain confidence in their cryptographic systems. In US, National Institute of Standards (NIST) has developed Cryptographic Module Validation Programme (CMVP). Random number generation being so central to cryptography, the CMVP makes use of an entropy source that has been evaluated according to the NIST Entropy Source Validation (ESV) programme a requirement. Since October 2022, it is for example mandatory for crypto modules aiming at FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-3 certification to have an ESV validated entropy source. Parties developing cryptographic solutions used by US government will have to be certified according to CMVP programme of NIST and therefore use an ESV certified random number generator.

ID Quantique is proud to announce that its Quantis QRNG chips product range has just received ESV certification on Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) entropy estimation track. NIST has verified that random bits produced by Quantis QRNG chips are independent and uniformly distributed. The independence property means that observing some bits does not provide any information on future bits to be generated. The uniform distribution property implies that 0’s and 1’s are equally likely to be generated.

To obtain that high level of quality of entropy, IDQ’s patented QRNG technology exploits the fact that number of photons emitted by a common light source fluctuates randomly by nature. These fluctuations, also called “quantum shot noise”, are purely of a quantum origin, and are therefore fundamentally random as per laws of quantum physics and totally immune from environmental perturbations, resulting in a guaranteed reliable and stable source of entropy. This certificate provides assurance that an entropy source conforms to NIST SP 800-90B and IDQ’s QRNG chips fully meet these requirements.

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