Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/266

L-P States of RC4 Stream Cipher

Jing Lv and Dongdai Lin

Abstract: The stream cipher RC4 was designed by R.Rivest in $1987$, and it is a widely deployed cipher. Many predictive states of RC4 for some special indices $i$ were presented in the last $20$ years. In this paper, we present several long term predictive states. These states increase the probability to guess part of the internal state in a known plaintext attack and present a cryptanalytic weakness of RC4. This paper also analyzes possible long term bias in the keystream and further propose a search method for the long term predictive states.

Category / Keywords: RC4, Distinguishing attack, predictive states, L-P states

Date: received 8 May 2013, last revised 14 May 2013

Contact author: lvjing at is iscas ac cn

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20130514:084437 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/266

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