Abstract
The security of the alleged RC4 stream cipher and some variants is investigated. Cryptanalytic algorithms are developed for a known plaintext attack where only a small segment of plaintext is assumed to be known. The analysis methods reveal intrinsic properties of alleged RC4 which are independent of the key scheduling and the key size. The complexity of one of the attacks is estimated to be less than the time of searching through the square root of all possible initial states. However, this still poses no threat to alleged RC4 in practical applications.
F.W.O. postdoctoral researcher, sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (Belgium).
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B. Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Wiley, New York, 1996.
J. Dj. Golić, “Linear Statistical Weakness of Alleged RC4 Keystream Generator,„ Advances in Cryptology-EUROCRYPT’97, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1233, Walter Fumy (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 226–238.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Knudsen, L.R., Meier, W., Preneel, B., Rijmen, V., Verdoolaege, S. (1998). Analysis Methods for (Alleged) RC4. In: Ohta, K., Pei, D. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — ASIACRYPT’98. ASIACRYPT 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1514. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49649-1_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49649-1_26
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