Observations on NIST SP 800-90B entropy estimators

ASLAN M., DOĞANAKSOY A., Saygı Z., Sönmez Turan M., Sulak F.

Cryptography and Communications, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Basım Tarihi: 2025
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1007/s12095-025-00778-7
  • Dergi Adı: Cryptography and Communications
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Compendex, INSPEC, zbMATH
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Cryptography, Entropy estimation, Min-entropy, Randomness
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Random numbers play a crucial role in cryptography since the security of cryptographic protocols relies on the assumption of the availability of uniformly distributed and unpredictable random numbers to generate secret keys, nonce, salt, etc. However, real-world random number generators sometimes fail and produce outputs with low entropy, leading to security vulnerabilities. The NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-90 series provides guidelines and recommendations for generating random numbers for cryptographic applications and describes 10 black-box entropy estimation methods. This paper evaluates the effectiveness and limitations of the SP 800-90 methods by exploring the accuracy of these estimators using simulated random numbers with known entropy, investigating the correlation between entropy estimates, and studying the impacts of deterministic transformations on the estimators.