> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 09:29:23PM +0200, Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote: > Here's how the distribution looks like for device_attach() times of my > sound card. The times were 26bit numbers, so this is after discarding > top ten bits, which leave us with 16 lower bits of pure entropy:) > http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/harvest_device_attach.png Kudos to > my friend Mariusz (CCed) who is mathematician and who helped me with > visualization and also promissed to prepare formal proof:) Hi All, I am not a mathematician :-) Below you will find some initial formal proof. Problem definition: checking if data sample comes from uniform distribution. Data sample: 2081 empirical observations (after discarding top ten bits) One-sample Kolmogorv-Smirnov test Hypothesis (based on the Cumulative Distribution Functions) H0: Empirical CDF given by 2081 obs. = theoretical uniform CDF H1: (alternatively) Empirical CDF is different than theoretical uniform CDF K-S Statistic: D = 0.017405527 p-value = 0.535 Interpretation: if p-value is much higher than significance level (alpha) then there is no reason to reject H0 hypothesis, if p-value is much smaller than significance level (alpha) then we strongly reject H0 hypothesis. So take any reasonable significance level (i.e. alpha = 0.05 which is far less than 0.535) and you have a proof that empirical observations are in fact given by random uniform numbers. Additionally please take a look on the linked chart http://bamper.vot.pl/ks.jpg It shows: Good fit in general Best fit for the range 0 - c.a 3000 Worse fit for the range c.a. 3000 - 65536 It means that numbers between 0 - 3000 are more random than numbers between 3000 - 6536 Best regards, Mariusz _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"