Recommendations on statistical randomness test batteries for cryptographic purposes

Abstract

Security in different applications is closely related to the goodness of the sequences generated for such purposes. Not only in Cryptography but also in other areas, it is necessary to obtain long sequences of random numbers or that, at least, behave as such. To decide whether the generator used produces sequences that are random, unpredictable and independent, statistical checks are needed. Different batteries of hypothesis tests have been proposed for this purpose. In this work, a survey of the main test batteries is presented, indicating their pros and cons, giving some guidelines for their use and presenting some practical examples.