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Ask HN: What is the best test for statistical randomness?
13 points by _coldfire on Aug 28, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Current choices seem to be NIST SP-800-22, DieHarder and Test U01, all of which certainly overlap.

Why is there no battery of tests that includes standards developed by different countries and their obvious biases?



Broad statistical tests are good enough for most all non-crypto RNGs - once you pass DieHarder you're probably good enough for practially all common RNG uses.

Breaking crypto RNGs is a subtle enough art that having a standardized set of tests wouldn't actually prove anything useful - it would be like saying "We tried every key in our collection on this new padlock and none of them worked, therefore the padlock is secure."

-Austin, author of SMHasher


http://random.mat.sbg.ac.at/tests/ "On this page, you will find information on tests for uniform random number generators (RNGs)"


Lossless compression algorithms. True randomness should yield near 0% compression ratios.


PractRand is a useful test suite.




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