Preface:

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 20543:2019 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.

This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been developed in compliance with Standards Council of Canada requirements for National Standards of Canada. It has been published as a National Standard of Canada by CSA Group.

Scope:

This document specifies a methodology for the evaluation of non-deterministic or deterministic random bit generators intended to be used for cryptographic applications. The provisions given in this document enable the vendor of an RBG to submit well-defined claims of security to an evaluation authority and shall enable an evaluator or a tester, for instance a validation authority, to evaluate, test, certify or reject these claims.

This document is implementation-agnostic. Hence, it offers no specific guidance on design and implementation decisions for random bit generators. However, design and implementation issues influence the evaluation of an RBG in this document, for instance because it requires the use of a stochastic model of the random source and because any such model is supported by technical arguments pertaining to the design of the device at hand.

Random bit generators as evaluated in this document aim to output bit strings that appear evenly distributed. Depending on the distribution of random numbers required by the consuming application, however, it is worth noting that additional steps can be necessary (and can well be critical to security) for the consuming application to transform the random bit strings produced by the RBG into random numbers of a distribution suitable to the application requirements. Such subsequent transformations are outside the scope of evaluations performed in this document.