Parallel implementation of the NIST Statistical Test Suite

Randomness test suites constitute an essential component within the process of assessing random number generators in view of determining their suitability for a specific application. Evaluating the randomness quality of random numbers sequences produced by a given generator is not an easy task considering that no finite set of statistical tests can assure perfect randomness, instead each test attempts to rule out sequences that show deviation from perfect randomness by means of certain statistical properties. This is the reason why several batteries of statistical tests are applied to increase the confidence in the selected generator. Therefore, in the present context of constantly increasing volumes of random data that need to be tested, special importance has to be given to the performance of the statistical test suites. Our work enrolls in this direction and this paper presents the results on improving the well known NIST Statistical Test Suite (STS) by introducing parallelism and a paradigm shift towards byte processing delivering a design that is more suitable for today's multicore architectures. Experimental results show a very significant speedup of up to 103 times compared to the original version.