Global and Local Entropy Tests for STL Files Under IEEE-754 Validity Constraints
Abstract
Shannon entropy is a standard measure of ciphertext randomness, evaluated either globally over the byte histogram of the entire ciphertext or locally as the average over non-overlapping blocks of ?xed size. While the global statistic captures only the overall byte distribution, the local statistic is also sensitive to non-randomness that is con?ned to parts of the ciphertext. Both measures are commonly assessed against reference values derived under the assumption of independent uniform bytes. However, STL encodes most numerical data as single-precision IEEE-754 ?oats, and format validity requires them to be ?nite, causing nonuniform byte probabilities and dependence between the two bytes of each exponent pair. We derive the exact mean and variance of entropy under the valid-STL (VSTL) distribution, which assigns equal probability to every admissible sequence of triangle records, and provide second-order expansions that keep the global reference values practical to compute at large ?le sizes. Using these expansions, we establish a two-sided hypothesis test for the global entropy statistic, whose limiting value is lowered from 8 to 7.99991479609 bits. The format constraints also change the local entropy reference: applying the capacity energy criterion to triangle records selects a block size of 1950 bytes instead of 1936 bytes, with an exact reference mean of 7.903106732975 rather than 7.902469316647 bits. Although small, these shifts are su?cient to place the VSTL reference means outside the conventional 95% acceptance intervals at practical ?le sizes, making unadjusted entropy tests prone to falsely rejecting ideal VSTL ciphertexts. Monte-Carlo simulations con?rm all reference values within sampling error. We therefore recommend using the format-speci?c reference values derived here to evaluate STL ciphers.
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BibTeX
@misc{troev2026global,
title = {{Global and Local Entropy Tests for STL Files Under IEEE-754 Validity Constraints}},
author = {Tonislav Troev and Borislav Stoyanov},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.19852},
eprint = {2610.19852},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19852},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Global and Local Entropy Tests for STL Files Under IEEE-754 Validity Constraints
AU - Tonislav Troev
AU - Borislav Stoyanov
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.19852
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19852
AB - Shannon entropy is a standard measure of ciphertext randomness, evaluated either globally over the byte histogram of the entire ciphertext or locally as the average over non-overlapping blocks of ?xed size. While the global statistic captures only the overall byte distribution, the local statistic is also sensitive to non-randomness that is con?ned to parts of the ciphertext. Both measures are commonly assessed against reference values derived under the assumption of independent uniform bytes. However, STL encodes most numerical data as single-precision IEEE-754 ?oats, and format validity requires them to be ?nite, causing nonuniform byte probabilities and dependence between the two bytes of each exponent pair. We derive the exact mean and variance of entropy under the valid-STL (VSTL) distribution, which assigns equal probability to every admissible sequence of triangle records, and provide second-order expansions that keep the global reference values practical to compute at large ?le sizes. Using these expansions, we establish a two-sided hypothesis test for the global entropy statistic, whose limiting value is lowered from 8 to 7.99991479609 bits. The format constraints also change the local entropy reference: applying the capacity energy criterion to triangle records selects a block size of 1950 bytes instead of 1936 bytes, with an exact reference mean of 7.903106732975 rather than 7.902469316647 bits. Although small, these shifts are su?cient to place the VSTL reference means outside the conventional 95% acceptance intervals at practical ?le sizes, making unadjusted entropy tests prone to falsely rejecting ideal VSTL ciphertexts. Monte-Carlo simulations con?rm all reference values within sampling error. We therefore recommend using the format-speci?c reference values derived here to evaluate STL ciphers.
ER -