## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2008/017

New State Recovery Attack on RC4

Alexander Maximov and Dmitry Khovratovich

Abstract: The stream cipher RC4 was designed by R.~Rivest in 1987, and it has a very simple and elegant structure. It is probably the most deployed cipher on the Earth.

~~~~In this paper we analyse the class RC4-$N$ of RC4-like stream ciphers, where $N$ is the modulus of operations, as well as the length of internal arrays. Our new attack is a state recovery attack which accepts the keystream of a certain length, and recovers the internal state. For the original RC4-256, our attack has total complexity of around $2^{241}$ operations, whereas the best previous attack needs $2^{779}$ of time. Moreover, we show that if the secret key is of length $N$ bits or longer, the new attack works faster than an exhaustive search. The algorithm of the attack was implemented and verified on small cases.

Category / Keywords: RC4, state recovery attack, key recovery attack.

Date: received 10 Jan 2008, last revised 20 Feb 2008

Contact author: Alexander Maximov at ericsson com

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2008/017

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