Statistical Testing of Random Number Generators
Juan Soto · 1999
: Random Number Generators 1 (RNGs) are an important building block for algorithms and protocols in cryptography. They are paramount in the construction of encryption keys and other cryptographic algorithm parameters. In practice, statistical testing is employed to gather evidence that a generator indeed produces numbers that appear to be random. Few resources are readily available to researchers in academia and industry who wish to analyze their newly developed RNG. To address this problem, NIST has developed new metrics that may be employed to investigate the randomness of cryptographic RNGs. In this paper, issues such as statistical test suites, evaluation frameworks, and the interpretation of results are addressed. 1.0 Introduction In computer security, suitable metrics are needed to investigate the degree of randomness for binary sequences produced by cryptographic random number generators (RNGs). Today, researchers are developing new hardware and software based RNGs. However,...