Re: Data Entropy Tool

[exon <exon () home se>]

davidribyrne () yahoo com wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a tool or library for measuring data entropy? Pass it a string, it returns a score.

Possibly you want the Levenshtein algorithm, but that's not accurate on 
unfixed lengths of entropy. If you want to measure each 
rand()-equivalent result, just treat each resulting unsigned int as a 
hash-value and see how many collisions you get. Since this is so trivial 
tro write I don't think anyone has made a tool available. This should 
(sort of) work (fix spelling errors yourself; it's friday and I'm drunk 
and headed for the pub).

---8<---8<---8<---
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  unsigned x, coll[1024], c = 0;
  double biggest;
  for (x = 0; x < 1024; x++)
    coll[x] = 0;

    while ((x == read(fileno(STDIN)) != EOF) {
      c++;
      coll[x & 1023]++;
    }

  for (x = 0; x < 1024; x++) {
    if ((double)x / (double)c < (double)1023.0 / (double)c)
      biggest = (double)1023.0 / (double)c;

  if (biggest > 0.55)
    printf("Bad entropy, you foolsome git!\n");
  else
    printf("Nicely done. Entropy is acceptable\n");

  return 0;
}

---8<---8<---8<---

Use as such:

prng --lots-of-numbers | whatever-you-compile-the-above-to

/exon