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Comment by adrian_b

4 days ago

I am familiar with that site and the PCG PRNGs are based on a sound principle, so they are good for many applications.

However I have never seen a place where the author says something about finding a statistical defect in ChaCha. She only correctly says that ChaCha is significantly slower than PRNGs like those of the PCG kind (and that it also shares the same property that any PRNG with a fixed state size has, of limited high-dimensional equidistribution; this is also true for any concrete instantiation of the PRNGs recommended by the author; the only difference is that with PRNGs having a simple definition you can make the same structure with a bigger state, as big as you want, but once you have chosen a size, you have again a limit; the PCG PRNGs recommended there, when having greater sizes than cryptographic PRNGs, they become slower than those cryptographic PRNGs, due to slow large integer multiplications).

In the past, I have seen some claims of statistical tests distinguishing cryptographic PRNGs that were false, due to incorrect methodology. E.g. I have seen a ridiculous paper claiming that an AI method is able to recognize that an AES PRNG is non-random. However, reading the paper has shown that they did not find anything that could distinguish a number sequence produced by AES from a true random sequence. Instead, they could distinguish the AES sequence from numbers read from /dev/random on an unspecified computer, using an unspecified operating system. Therefore, if there were statistical biases, those were likely in whichever was their /dev/random implementation (as many such implementations are bad, and even a good implementation may appear to have statistical abnormalities, depending on the activity done on the computer), not in the AES sequence.