Distinguishing Attacks on RC4 and A New Improvement of the Cipher

Jing Lv; Bin Zhang; Dongdai Lin

Paper 2013/176

Distinguishing Attacks on RC4 and A New Improvement of the Cipher

Jing Lv, Bin Zhang, and Dongdai Lin

Abstract

RC4, designed by Rivest in 1987, is the most widely deployed stream cipher in practical applications. In this paper, two new class of statistical biases inherent in RC4 are depicted and it is shown that the RC4 keystream is distinguishable from random no matter how many initial bytes have been dumped. RC4A, proposed by Paul and Preneel at FSE 2004 to strengthen the security of RC4, is also found to be vulnerable to similar attacks. Instead, a new pseudorandom bit generator RC4B is proposed, which is believed to provide better immunity against the known attacks.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Secret-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords: RC4 Bias Distinguishing attacks state
Contact author(s): lvjing @ iscas ac cn
History: 2013-03-30: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2013/176
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/176,
      author = {Jing Lv and Bin Zhang and Dongdai Lin},
      title = {Distinguishing Attacks on {RC4} and A New Improvement of the Cipher},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2013/176},
      year = {2013},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/176}
}