Cryptographic Randomness Testing of Block Ciphers and Hash Functions

One of the most basic properties expected from block ciphers and hash functions is passing statistical randomness testing, as they are expected to behave like random mappings. Previously, testing of AES candidate block ciphers was done by concatenating the outputs of the algorithms obtained from various input types. In this work, a more convenient method, namely the cryptographic randomness testing is introduced. A package of statistical tests are designed based on certain cryptographic properties of block ciphers and hash functions to evaluate their randomness. The package is applied to the AES finalists, and produced more precise results than those obtained in similar applications.