Random Number Generation from Pulsars

Hayder Tirmazi

Paper 2025/357

Random Number Generation from Pulsars

Hayder Tirmazi

, City College of New York

Abstract

Pulsars exhibit signals with precise inter-arrival times that are on the order of milliseconds to seconds, depending on the individual pulsar. There are subtle variations in the timing of pulsar signals. We show that these variations can serve as a natural entropy source for the creation of Random Number Generators (RNGs). We also explore the effects of using randomness extractors to increase the entropy of random bits extracted from Pulsar timing data. To evaluate the quality of the Pulsar RNG, we model its entropy as a $k$ -source and use well-known cryptographic results to show its closeness to a theoretically ideal uniformly random source. To remain consistent with prior work, we also show that the Pulsar RNG passes well-known statistical tests such as the NIST test suite.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: pulsars astronomy data analysis cryptography theoretical computer science rng trng
Contact author(s): hayder research @ gmail com
History: 2025-04-23: revised; 2025-02-25: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/357
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/357,
      author = {Hayder Tirmazi},
      title = {Random Number Generation from Pulsars},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/357},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/357}
}