HAVEGE (HArdware Volatile Entropy Gathering and Expansion) is a user-level software unpredictable random number generator for general-purpose computers that exploits these modifications of the internal volatile hardware states as a source of uncertainty. During an initialization phase, the hardware clock cycle counter of the processor is used to gather part of this entropy: tens of thousands of unpredictable bits can be gathered per operating system call in average.
HAVEGE combines on-the-fly hardware volatile entropy gathering with pseudo-random number generation. The internal state of HAVEGE includes thousands of internal volatile hardware states and is merely unmonitorable.
Therefore HAVEGE features a very high security level. HAVEGE can reach an unprecedented throughput for a software unpredictable random number generator: several hundreds of megabits per second on current workstations and PCs.
The throughput of HAVEGE favorably competes with usual pseudo-random number generators such as rand() or random(). While HAVEGE was initially designed for cryptology-like application, this high throughput makes HAVEGE usable for all application domains demanding for high performance and high quality random number generators, e.g. Monte Carlo simulations.
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