NIST STS in limited environments

Mgr. Balaji Kommuru

Master's thesis

Abstract:

NIST Statistical Test Suite(STS) is very popular for randomness testing of binary sequences. It has 15 number of empirical tests to evaluate the randomness of the given random data. These tests take lot of time to process the data even with decent configuration of computer systems. Tests even take hours of time to complete evaluation for usual data sizes of in Giga Bytes. There are lot of other alternative test batteries available like Diehard, TestU01, ENT and CryptX etc,. These batteries implemented a subset of NIST Tests. There were lot of efforts made to improve the performance of these batteries. One of these, optimized version of NIST STS using lookup tables and other improvements, named O-NIST is available, and is the reference Test Suite for the thesis. In general these tests are run offline. In some situations it may be necessary to evaluate the randomness on-the-fly. Or may be required to run tests in limited computed environments like sensor nodes, smartphones etc,. The thesis objective is to develop on-the-fly Tests for the Arduino and Raspberry Pi3 boards using the reference battery O-NIST. The scope of the work includes analysis of resources required for the Tests, selection of suitable Tests, Test parameters analysis, improving Tests from resources usage point of view, implementation, testing and evaluating of Tests for Arduino and Raspberry Pi3 boards.

Abstract:

NIST Statistical Test Suite(STS) is very popular for randomness testing of binary sequences. It has 15 number of empirical tests to evaluate the randomness of the given random data. These tests take lot of time to process the data even with decent configuration of computer systems. Tests even take hours of time to complete evaluation for usual data sizes of in Giga Bytes. There are lot of other alternative test batteries available like Diehard, TestU01, ENT and CryptX etc,. These batteries implemented a subset of NIST Tests. There were lot of efforts made to improve the performance of these batteries. One of these, optimized version of NIST STS using lookup tables and other improvements, named O-NIST is available, and is the reference Test Suite for the thesis. In general these tests are run offline. In some situations it may be necessary to evaluate the randomness on-the-fly. Or may be required to run tests in limited computed environments like sensor nodes, smartphones etc,. The thesis objective is to develop on-the-fly Tests for the Arduino and Raspberry Pi3 boards using the reference battery O-NIST. The scope of the work includes analysis of resources required for the Tests, selection of suitable Tests, Test parameters analysis, improving Tests from resources usage point of view, implementation, testing and evaluating of Tests for Arduino and Raspberry Pi3 boards.

Keywords

NIST STS, Arduino Due, Raspberry Pi 3, Randomness Testing, Limited Environment, O-NIST, hypothesis test, P-Value, random number generator, statistical tests, Constrained Devices

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 13. 12. 2018

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 1. 2. 2019
• Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. et Mgr. Zdeněk Říha, Ph.D.
• Reader: Mgr. Marek Sýs, Ph.D.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Master programme / field:
Informatics / Information Technology Security (eng.)