About data input size

[MrZMN]

Dear contributors,

First of all, thank you so much for providing this amazing tool and kindly share it as open source.

I have a bit string of approx 40 Kbit length. When I was using the tool, I found that the 'Maurer's Universal test' gave a very weird result of -1.0. I subsequently checked the source code and found this boils down to that you have limited the input length to 387 Kbit, as suggested in the NIST codebook.

This makes totally sense to me. However, my question will be that: why not add such length limitations on other tests as well? For example, I notice the suggested minimal length of Spectrum test is 1000 bit, but I didn't see such constraints in the source code. Will this make results of certain cases (i.e., short bit strings as input) invalid?

Thank you again for your contributions! Well done!

Best,
Mo

[MrZMN]

Sry, as a supplement of what I said previously.

What I actually meant was: for certain tests where the input length doesn't follow the NIST suggestions, why not apply strict reject directly (such as the Maurer's Universal test); instead, add paddings (pls correct me if I'm wrong) like what you did in this tool.

Hope this is not a naive question

Best,
Mo