Constructing Empirical Tests of Randomness

In this paper we introduce a general framework for automatic construction of empirical tests of randomness. Our new framework generalises and improves a previous approach (Svenda et al., 2013) and it also provides a clear statistical interpretation of its results. This new approach was tested on selected stream ciphers from the eSTREAM competition. Results show that our approach can lay foundations to randomness testing and it is comparable to the Statistical Test Suite developed by NIST. Additionally, the proposed approach is able to perform randomness analysis even when presented with sequences shorter by several orders of magnitude than required by the NIST suite. Although the Dieharder battery still provides a slightly better randomness analysis, our framework is able to detect non-randomness for stream ciphers with limited number of rounds (Hermes, Fubuki) where both above-mentioned batteries fail.