FEATURES OF USING NIST TESTS FOR ANALYSIS OF COVERING OBJECT LAYERS IN STEGANOGRAPHY SYSTEMS

The article is devoted to the use of NIST testing results in steganography systems. NIST testing results are known to be used to estimate the «randomness» of a bit sequence, which in a particular case serves as a layer of a covering object. This approach has a significant drawback, consisting in discarding a large amount of information, using only the statement «random» or «non-random» studied sequence. The article proposes to use the full number of results of all NIST tests. The test results are presented in the form of readings and allow not only to estimate the «randomness» degree but also to see the features of the statistical characteristics of the objects being studied, which is of key importance for steganography systems. The results presented in the article were obtained using computer simulation in the Python environment.