The Perils of Repeating Patterns: Observation of Some Weak Keys in RC4

Joachim Strömbergson; Simon Josefsson

Paper 2013/241

The Perils of Repeating Patterns: Observation of Some Weak Keys in RC4

Joachim Strömbergson and Simon Josefsson

Abstract

We describe some observed trivially weak keys for the stream cipher RC4. Keys with repeating patterns are found to be key length invariant. The cause of the problem is the simplistic key dependent state permutation in the RC4 initialization.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Secret-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords: RC4 KSA weak keys cryptanalysis stream cipher pseudo randomness
Contact author(s): joachim @ secworks se
History: 2013-05-03: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2013/241
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/241,
      author = {Joachim Strömbergson and Simon Josefsson},
      title = {The Perils of Repeating Patterns: Observation of Some Weak Keys in {RC4}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2013/241},
      year = {2013},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/241}
}