AmeraKey® is a source of true randomness which provides the entropy necessary to generate high quality encryption keys used by symmetric algorithms such as AES. Like any true random number generator (TRNG), AmeraKey® extraction, takes a snapshot of a natural phenomenon, in this case noise in a digital image. To distill the entropy from the noise in an image, the harvesting looks at low-order bits from different pixels/colors which are then exclusive-OR ’ed to produce the bits of the key data. This isolates the inherent noise from the subject and the camera from the ordered signal of the photograph and concentrates the low-level noise. The pixels being sampled are randomized by a shuffling process driven by picture data itself and a hash of the harvest code. This disperses any local trend to similar pixels.