[Libre-soc-dev] [OpenPOWER-HDL-Cores] microwatt grows up LCA2021

[Paul Mackerras]

On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 10:42:16AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

> CSRC NIST.gov's STS.  except do not bother with the Lempel-Zive test
> because it is flawed.  i explain why in the link betrusted-soc.

I found sts-2_1_2.zip on the NIST web site, along with the paper that
describes it.  There were some gcc warnings when compiling it, and the
"Universal Statistical" test always produces p=0 no matter what set of
numbers I give it, so I suspect gcc has exercised its prerogative to
break your program if it has any non-compliance with the C standard.

I cloned the github repo that someone has set up (kravietz/nist-sts)
and that has a few changes in it, so I'll try that (though one of them
is to #define WINDOWS32, which is a bit concerning).

When you were using STS, did you have any framework to run it
automatically and generate summaries, or did you just run it manually
and look at the finalAnalysisReport.txt file?

> btw one very important thing, it may be worthwhile to coordinate with
> Bunnie Huang regarding the FAILURE runs here:
> 
> https://github.com/betrusted-io/betrusted-wiki/wiki/TRNG-characterization
> 
> the marsaglia tests in particular have me concerned, they fail twice.

I'm running dieharder again now, and I got:

 marsaglia_tsang_gcd|   0|  10000000|     100|0.09468860|  PASSED  
 marsaglia_tsang_gcd|   0|  10000000|     100|0.72404443|  PASSED  

That's just one data point of course, but there doesn't seem to be an
immediate indication of a problem here.

Paul.