Effect of ionizing radiation on TRNGs for safe telecommunications: Robustness and randomness

True-random number generators (TRNGs) are being recently defined, designed and prototyped on digital electronic circuits, like part of encryption and decryption algorithms. They provide very interesting results in terms of security and cost. In harsh environments, like aerospace applications, Single Event Upsets (SEUs) are a main concern. TRNGs are currently used in satellite communications to enhance security by ciphering critical data. This work studies the effects of SEUs on a particular architecture of TRNGs. The analysis is performed by injecting fault models in a physical TRNG implementation.