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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:21
Peter Gutmann (pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz)
Fri, 9 Apr 1999 13:23:05 (NZST)
>I just generated some raw binary files with my BSD 3.0 (Walnut Creek)
>/dev/random and then ran Maurer's Universal Statistical Test (blocksize=8
>bits) on the result. MUST measured ~7.19 reliably on several indendent runs.
>This is the expected value for a uniformly distributed random sample.
>
>BSD's /dev/random is good.
ITYM "Anything hashed with SHA-1 will pass a statistical test". You could
have started it with a hardcoded, all-zero seed value and it'd still pass the
test. A better way to measure the effectiveness of entropy-gathering PRNG's
is given in my 1998 Usenix security symposium paper,
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/random.pdf.
Peter.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:21