Solaris /dev/random

[E. Larry Lidz]

Michael Roth writes:
>On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, E. Larry Lidz wrote:
>
>> I've done the following patch which seems to get GPG to find and accept
>> the /dev/random, but I've got doubts about whether it's sufficient 
>> cryptographically to make it safe to run GPG under Solaris as I don't
>> really know too much about the cryptographic elements of the code.
>
>Hmm. I don't know anything about /dev/random on Solaris. However, you can
>use a small tool to test the random number generator. Check out
>"http://www.fourmilab.to/random/". Copy some data from /dev/random in a
>file (about 50KB) using `dd' and then run the test on that file. Please
>post the result on this list.

With a 68k file:
Entropy = 7.996897 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size
of this 68608 byte file by 0 percent.

Chi square distribution for 68608 samples is 296.66, and randomly
would exceed this value 5.00 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.2231 (127.5 = random).
Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.153402134 (error 0.38 percent).
Serial correlation coefficient is -0.003776 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

With a bit larger file, 485k or so:

The results were:
Entropy = 7.999661 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size
of this 485888 byte file by 0 percent.

Chi square distribution for 485888 samples is 228.43, and randomly
would exceed this value 75.00 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.5617 (127.5 = random).
Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.146762821 (error 0.16 percent).
Serial correlation coefficient is 0.000903 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

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