Calculate Shannon's entropy

• C++ application, could accept a file or distribution with provided parameters, and calculate its entropy according to Shannon's defenition
• We take a probability to meet any byte in the file, multiply to its logarithm and accumulate for all possible bytes (yeah, 0x0 to 0xFF)
• See more detailed explanation in Wiki
• In case of a file we can do estimation about format
• We support uniform and normal distribution. In case of normal distribution we could assign mean and standard deviation
• Application made with a research purpose

Explanation

• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Shannon_entropy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_uniform_distribution
• Entropy value calculated without a leading coefficient, it means it could be a float value in range (0, 8), where 0.0 is an absolute order, 8.0 is an absolute chaos.

Building and some specific

• Application is CMake-based and could be compiled on any platform that have CMake 3.0+ installed
• Just create build directory in the project catalog mkdir build, enter cd build it and execute cmake ..
• Boost required for compilation, we use console-based progress-bar to make entropy calculation look pretty, Boost Test for unit-testing etc.
• I had to provide std::codecvt<std::uint8_t> specialization for binary file streams. MS compiler provide one, but GCC does not (and doesn't have to as it's not a C++ Standard requirement)
• Specific installation does not required, application is portable

Applications

• Could be used to detect whether file was encrypted or archived (the value should be close to 8.0)
• Could be used for building correlation between data format and its entropy (dataset should be big enough)
• Could be used for estimation between distribution properties and entropy
• Application is intentionaly as simple as possible