Quote from: n0nce on November 05, 2022, 12:36:51 PM

I don't think this is suited for your application. This program gives you the entropy per byte / character for evaluating data density of a file.

yeah probably it's not but at least I can see character counts and get a good idea of there's any bias in them. not sure of a tool that could take a file of hex private keys and do what you're suggesting.

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It should give a high entropy result, even if the PRNG was seeded with a known seed which would then be used to reconstruct the randomness.

it gave Entropy = 4.053136 bits per byte.
that was for a file that had 125,000 hex private keys in it.
apparently it treat each character as 8 bits.

When i ran it with the -b option i was kind of surprised though that 1s and 0s did not seem to occur at an equal frequency at all. there was a pretty big imbalance there. but i'm not sure if that's an issue. but we're talking not 50/50 not even close.

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I may be wrong, but I think a program that gives you entropy 'per 64-byte seed' (instead of per-byte) across a large set of generated seeds, instead of calculating entropy across a stream of bytes.

If you're using the H(X) formula for entropy you mentioned earlier in the thread then I don't see how that formula could really be useful since if you're taking your universe of possible outcomes to be all 64-byte seeds, then it would be highly unlikely that any of them were duplicated even in a massive file. Thus you would obtain maximum entropy every time on every test run. Doesn't tell you anything. You will never find a duplicate so all your "objects" will be distinct and have the same probability of happening. nothing useful about that.

I think a useful tool would need not only to calculate frequencies of each hex character but of combinations (permutations) of twos, threes and so on. And analyze if there was any bias in any of those character counts. I don't know of a tool that does that though.

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Well, the 'avalanche noise source' electronic method can actually be observed ('see what is going on'); you do need some lab equipment, though. Keep in mind that just visually inspecting the circuit can already give you some confidence that you received the circuit actually specified in the schematic. Inspecting the schematic tells you what the circuit does, so sneaking in some backdoor is going to be pretty hard on such a device.

i'd love to have one of those devices but i don't think i can get an oscilloscope and things to help build it. that's the problem i think you need that type of thing. building the thing while i guess its tedious would not be the hardest part the harder part would be figuring out how to interface it to something and do data collection. hence why you don't see people doing this all the time. and the people that do, they just show a short video of the output on their screen nothing to learn there.