Try Diehard at http://stat.fsu.edu/~geo/diehard.html 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.

-- Clifford Heath http://www.osa.com.au/~cjh Open Software Associates Limited mailto:cjh@osa.com.au 29 Ringwood Street / PO Box 4414 Phone +613 9871 1694 Ringwood VIC 3134 AUSTRALIA Fax +613 9871 1711 ------------------------------------------------------------ Deploy Applications across the net, see http://www.osa.com

On Fri, 2 Oct 1998, 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.

You mean you don't have a copy of Knuth, Vol 2. For shame! I'm too lazy to look it up for you, but I believe the two tests are called the Run test and the Chi-square method. (trying to remember from my own dusty compSci memories) jim

One very easy test is to compress the produced random number binary files with various compression algorithms or programs. If the data is truly random, it should not be possible to achieve any compression. At least not if you include the compression program data size in the calculation. Well, I'm not sure whether this is such a good practical test or not.(?) ++ J On Fri, 2 Oct 1998, 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.

-- Clifford Heath http://www.osa.com.au/~cjh Open Software Associates Limited mailto:cjh@osa.com.au 29 Ringwood Street / PO Box 4414 Phone +613 9871 1694 Ringwood VIC 3134 AUSTRALIA Fax +613 9871 1711 ------------------------------------------------------------ Deploy Applications across the net, see http://www.osa.com

At 11:13 AM 10/2/98 +0100, Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

Clifford Heath wrote:

...

I suggest that you do at least Maurer's test which is described in A. J. Menezes et al. Handbook of Applied Cryptography. The test is not difficult to code. You could also look at my code in http://www.stud.uni-muenchen.de/~mok-kong.shen/#paper1 in Fortran.

M. K. Shen

/* UELI.c 1 Oct 98 This implements Ueli M Maurer's "Universal Statistical Test for Random Bit Generators" using L=16 Accepts a filename on the command line; writes its results, with other info, to stdout. Handles input file exhaustion gracefully. Ref: J. Cryptology v 5 no 2, 1992 pp 89-105 also on the web somewhere, which is where I found it. -David Honig honig@sprynet.com Built with Wedit 2.3, lcc-win32 http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32 26 Sept CP Release Version Notes: This version does L=16. It evolved from an L=8 prototype which I ported from the Pascal in the above reference. I made the memory usage reasonable by replacing Maurer's "block" array with the 'streaming' fgetc() call. Usage: UELI filename outputs to stdout */ #define L 16 // bits per block #define V (1<<L) // number of possible blocks #define Q (10*V) // at LEAST 10 * V, to assure each block seen #define K (100*Q) // at LEAST 100 * Q, as large as possible #define MAXSAMP (Q + K) #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> int main( int argc, char **argv ) { FILE *fptr; int i; int b, c; int table[V]; float sum=0.0; int run; // Human Interface printf("UELI 26 Sep 98\nL=%d %d %d \n", L, V, MAXSAMP); if (argc <2) {printf("Usage: UELI filename\n"); exit(-1); } else printf("Measuring file %s\n", argv[1]); // FILE IO fptr=fopen(argv[1],"rb"); if (fptr == NULL) {printf("Can't find %s\n", argv[1]); exit(-1); } // INIT for (i=0; i<V; i++) table[i]=0; for (i=0; i<Q; i++) { b= fgetc(fptr)<<8 | fgetc(fptr); table[ b ]=i; } printf("Init done\n"); // COMPUTE run=1; for (i=Q; run && i<Q+K; i++) { // COMPOSE A 16-bit quantity b=fgetc(fptr); if (b<0) run=0; c=fgetc(fptr); if (c<0) run=0; if (run) { b = b<<8 | c; sum += log( (double) ( i-table[b] ) ) ; table[ b ]=i; } } if (!run) printf("Premature end of file; read %d blocks.\n", i-Q); sum = (sum/( (double) (i-Q) ) ) / log(2.0); // i should be K if enough samples printf("%s fTU= %f\n\n", argv[1], sum); printf("Expected value for L=16 is 15.167379 \n"); // Add further interpretation/thresholding of the number of sigmas from expected, // and include the fudge factors explained in the paper. } // end