On the "randomness" of DNS

Ivan Krstić krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu
Wed Jul 30 14:55:33 EDT 2008


On Jul 30, 2008, at 1:56 PM, Ben Laurie wrote:
> Oh, and I should say that number of ports and standard deviation are  
> not a GREAT way to test for "randomness". For example, the sequence  
> 1000, 2000, ..., 27000 has 27 ports and a standard deviation of over  
> 7500, which looks pretty GREAT to me. But not very "random".


I boggled a bit at the abuse of simple descriptive statistics, too.  
For those interested in actual statistical tests of randomness,  
there's a good literature survey at <http://www.ciphersbyritter.com/RES/RANDTEST.HTM 
 >.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org

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