this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Cryptography
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cryptography (noun). The discipline concerned with communication security (eg, confidentiality of messages, integrity of messages, sender authentication, non-repudiation of messages, and many other related issues), regardless of the used medium such as pencil and paper or computers.
This community is for links about and discussion of cryptography specifically. For privacy technology more generally, use !privacy.
This community is explicitly not about cryptocurrency; see !crypto for that.
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@octade Hi Raze --
Have you tried generating millions of your random numbers, then subjecting them to randomness tests? Which tests did you use?
If you are referring to MEGARAND, no. There is no need for that since all of that has already been done over the years for the underlying primitives:
/dev/urandom ... b2sum ... shuf ... chacha20 ...
These primitives have been run through the gauntlet for years and are known to produce or use very good entropy. Chacha20 is especially prized for this and taking already random data and running it through the chacha20 cipher with random keys and/or salts is a very nice hedge against patterns and biases. Megarand stretches these primitive outputs to build a much larger pool for wherever you might want a big initial pool for pads, tokens, seeds, whatever.
If you're paranoid you can run dieharder tests on the output, but it would just be placebo at this point.