Randomness Testing: Result Interpretation and Speed
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | The New Codebreakers - Essays Dedicated to David Kahn on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783662493007 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49301-4_24 |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | Berlekamp-Massey algorithm; efficient implementation; NIST STS; randomness statistical testing |
| Description | In cryptography, randomness is typically tested using a battery of tests consisting of many tests of randomness -- each focusing on a different feature. Probability that data produced by a good generator would pass all the tests in a battery can get quite small for a large number of used tests. Therefore, results of many tests should be interpreted with a particular focus on this issue. We argue for the \v Sid\' ak correction -- this is a statistical method that can be used for evaluating multiple but independent tests. We analyzed the accuracy of the \v Sid\' ak correction since tests of randomness are usually correlated, and we undertook this analysis for the NIST Statistical Test Suite. Results show that correlation of tests of randomness has got only a marginal influence on the accuracy of the \v Sid\' ak correction. We also provide a speed-optimized version of NIST STS that achieved test results more than 30-times faster than the original NIST codes. |
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