FPGA acceleration of a pseudorandom number generator based on chaotic iterations Xiaole Fang a, *, Qianxue Wang b , Christophe Guyeux c , Jacques M. Bahi c a Land and Resources Technology Center of GuangDong Province, GuangZhou, 510075, China b College of Automation, GuangDong University of Technology, GuangZhou, 510006, China c FEMTO-ST Institute, UMR CNRS 6174, University of Franche-Comte ´, 25000, France Keywords: Internet security Pseudorandom number generator Discrete chaotic iterations Cryptographical security FPGA abstract As any well-designed information security application uses a very large quantity of good pseudorandom numbers, inefficient generation of these numbers can be a significant bottleneck in various situations. In previous research works, a technique that applies well- defined discrete iterations, satisfying the reputed Devaney’s definition of chaos, has been developed. It has been proven that the generators embedding these chaotic iterations (CIs) produce truly chaotic random numbers. In this new article, these generators based on chaotic iterations are redesigned specifically for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware, leading to an obvious improvement of the generation rate. Analyses illustrate that statistically perfect and chaotic random sequences are produced. Additionally, such generators can also be cryptographically secure. To show the effectiveness of the method, an application in the information hiding domain is finally proposed. ª 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) are very impor- tant primitives widely used in numerous applications like numerical simulations or security. For instance, they are one of the most fundamental component that any cryptosystem has to embed, in order to generate encryption keys or key- streams in symmetric ciphers. Depending on the targeted application, these PRNGs must achieve requirements as speed, statistical quality, security, and so on. On the one hand, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been successfully used for realizing the speed requirement in pseudorandom sequence generation, due to their high par- allelization capability (Bojanic et al., 2006; Danger et al., 2009; Tsoi et al., 2003). Advantages of such physical generation way encompass performance, design time, power con- sumption, flexibility, and cost. On the other hand, some re- searches have recently demonstrated the interest to use chaotic dynamical systems as PRNGs, among other things due to the unpredictability and distorted-like properties of such systems (Falcioni et al., 2005;(Cecen et al., 2009), and (Lee et al., 2004)). Their sensitivity to initial conditions and their broadband spectrum make them good candidates to generate sequences both secure and random. For instance, such chaos-based generators have been successfully used to strengthen optical communications (Larger and Dudley, 2010). In this paper, which continues with the studies initiated in Bahi et al. (2013a), Bahi et al. (2009), Bahi et al. (2011), Bahi and Guyeux (2010a), and Bahi et al. (2012a), we intend to merge * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: xiaole.fang@gmail.com (X. Fang), wangqianxue@gmail.com (Q. Wang), christophe.guyeux@univ-fcomte.fr (C. Guyeux), jacques.bahi@univ-fcomte.fr (J.M. Bahi). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jisa journal of information security and applications 19 (2014) 78 e87 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jisa.2014.02.003 2214-2126/ª 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.