[103814] in Cypherpunks
Re: Randomness testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Honig)
Sun Oct 4 17:22:12 1998
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 1998 13:52:42 -0700
To: Clifford Heath <cjh@osa.com.au>, cypherpunks-unedited@toad.com
From: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
In-Reply-To: <m0zOxtY-0001eoC@magpie.osa.com.au>
Reply-To: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
At 03:36 PM 10/2/98 +1000, Clifford Heath wrote:
>We have been asked by a customer if we have any tests that demonstrate
>the randomness of the SSLeay random number generator (augmented by some
>sound-card random number seeding that we wrote).
>
>I'd like to find some standard implementation for testing randomness, but
>Schneier offers no help (other than a reference to Knuth Vol 2), and I
>don't know where else to turn.
>
>I realise that cryptographic randomness requires unpredictability, and
>this quality depends upon closed-world assumptions about unknown individuals'
>predictive powers, but we have to live with that.
* Marsaglia's DIEHARD suite, also see DIEHARDC
* I posted code for Maurer's Universal statistical test a week or so
ago; I find this discriminates between a cipher output and real noise...
* Find the RAND corp paper on random numbers
* See FIPS 140
