This is part of an assignment and I'm not sure what conclusion I'm supposed to draw from the result.
We were supposed to generate two 1024 bytes words, one using an algorithm that randomly generate 0 and 1 (50%/50%) and one using an algorithm with a "secret" probability distribution. I'll call them word 1
and word 2
from now.
We were supposed to calculate the empirical entropy of each word bit per bit first, and then byte per byte.
I got the following results :
word 1
(bit per bit): 1.00
word 1
(byte per byte): 7.79
word 2
(bit per bit): 0.95
word 2
(byte per byte): 0.81
We where then supposed to generate a random 1024 bytes mask and apply it on each word, giving us word 1m
and word 2m
. The results are this time:
word 1m
(bit per bit): 1.00
word 1m
(byte per byte): 7.81
word 2m
(bit per bit): 1.00
word 2m
(byte per byte): 7.81
I'm not sure what those results mean! Of course I noticed the fact that the byte per byte empirical entropy of word 2
is low, which probably means that some specific bytes are appearing more often than other, but I don't know what happen for word 2m
Not sure I made myself very clear, don't hesitate to ask for clarifications. Thanks !
word 1
which is generated with a 50/50 probability for 0 and 1. If you're not comfortable with giving me the direct answer, a simple confirmation or invalidation of that fact would already be a great help! (the assignment isn't over) $\endgroup$word1 m
=word1
&&mask
, with && being the AND operator. $\endgroup$