Randomness Testing and Comparison of Classical and Quantum Bit Generators

Randomness is crucial to enabling secure and robust communications. Ideally one should harness high entropy physical processes, but this is difficult so pseudorandomness is usually substituted for randomness. We introduce improved complexity randomness tests and use them to judge three pseudorandom bit generators; the AES block cipher (standard, strongly believed to be secure), the Dragon stream cipher (eStream finalist), and the GNU C library function rand(). We also test the output from a quantum random bit generator (QRBG). While the two ciphers can easily be distinguished from the much inferior rand(), the output statistics of the two classical generators are similar to that of the QRBG, and both provide high-quality pseudorandom bits.