[129309] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: On the "randomness" of DNS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Pierre-Evariste Dagand)
Wed Jul 30 17:47:44 2008
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:57:08 +0200
From: "Pierre-Evariste Dagand" <pedagand@gmail.com>
To: "Ben Laurie" <ben@links.org>, cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <4890AB33.3020407@links.org>
> But just how GREAT is that, really? Well, we don'
> t know. Why? Because there isn't actually a way test for randomness. Your
> DNS resolver could be using some easily predicted random number generator
> like, say, a linear congruential one, as is common in the rand() library
> function, but DNS-OARC would still say it was GREAT. Believe them when they
> say it isn't GREAT, though!
Well, they are some tests to judge the "quality" of a random number
generator. The best known being the Diehard tests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests
http://stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard/
For sure, these tests might be an overkill here. Also, there must be
some tests in the Art of Computer Programming too but I don't have it
at hand right now (shame on me).
I don't see the point of evaluating the quality of a random number
generator by statistical tests. But I might be wrong, though.
Regards,
--
Pierre-Evariste DAGAND
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