Spotting Randomness

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE
3 min readMar 23

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You are gambling in a casino and there seems to be rather too many occurrences of a certain number. So how can you tell if the casino is cheating? Well, we would measure the entropy of the system, and determine how random the numbers were.

Encrypted content tends not to have a magic number (apart from detecting it in a disk partition). If we analyse both compressed and encrypted fragments of files we will see high degrees of…

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.