It might sound like the last thing you need in a precise piece of hardware, but engineers at Intel are pretty pleased to have found a way to build a circuit capable of random behavior into computer processors.
Generating randomness--an unpredictable stream of numbers--is much harder than you might think. It's also crucial to creating the secure cryptographic keys needed to keep data safe. Building a random-number-generating ability into the Central Processing Unit (CPU) at a computer's heart is ideal, says Ram Krishnamurthy, an engineer at Intel's Microprocessor Technology Labs, in Hillsboro, OR. It should speed up any process that requires the generation of an encrypted key, for example securing sensitive data on a hard drive, and make it harder for an attacker to compromise that encryption.Building circuitry capable of producing random numbers into a CPU has proved difficult. "Today random numbers are either generated in software, or in the chip set outside the microprocessor," explains Krishnamurthy, one of the Intel researchers on the project.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25670/
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