History
Jim Cheetham has always wanted to get a decent entropy source for the computers that he has been responsible for, but didn't manage to grab an EntropyKey while they were still available.Instead, in late 2013 he decided to make his own - but not without help! Questions were asked of cryptographers Ian Grigg and Peter Gutmann to make sure the OneRNG goals were reasonable and useful, and then he asked Paul Campbell for ideas on the hardware front.
Almost over the weekend, Paul repurposed some of his own existing Open Source hardware projects to make a prototype version. OneRNG was alive!
Funding via Kickstarter
Once a set of working devices had been created using Paul's new Pick & Place machine, we started to look at how to manufacture a reasonable volume of machines in a less manually-intensive way.We settled on a Kickstarter fundraising, to collect the cash needed to set up manufacturing in Shenzen, China. The beauty of OneRNG's attitude to verifiabililty rather than trust meant that we could embrace the flexibility of Chinese manufacturing, without having to worry about supply-chain subversion.
The campaign started in mid-December 2014, and completed with a very good indication of the demand for OneRNG - we met our initial goal within only 6 days, and by the end of the campaign we were funded to 485%.
Our estimated delivery date was May 2015, and by the end of May 2015 we had shipped all the units. There was a small return rate to deal with an unreliable component, and these were all fixed manually.
New Zealand Open Source Awards 2016
On the 25th of October 2016, Paul Campbell won the NZOSA award for Open Source Software Project with the OneRNG Project, saying "after all, most good hardware projects are mostly software".
Version 3
We are currently planning version 3 of the unit, and gearing up for another production run in Shenzen. Due to the care that we take with the firmware image, Paul needs to be present to load and verify the devices.
Team Members
The core team at OneRNG is based in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Jim Cheetham
Jim has been full-time in the security field since the mid-2000s, and in the unix/networking field since the mid-1980s. He is motivated by products that are useful, and likes to understand the theoretical limits of a technology. OneRNG represents a way to improve the underlying security of many operating systems and tools, and to avoid security mis-steps.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimcheetham
