An approach to assess the optimality of refining RC4

Author

Das, Suman ; Dey, Hemanta ; Ghosh, Ranjan

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Univ. of Calcutta, Kolkata, India

fYear

2015

fDate

7-8 Feb. 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

Though RC4 has proved itself as a simple, fast and robust stream cipher and it is trusted by many organizations, a number of researchers claimed that RC4 has some weakness and bias in its internal states. To increase its security, some guidelines recommended discarding some initial bytes like N, 2N or more from the RC4 key-stream (N is 256, generally). In this paper, the authors tried to find out the optimum number of bytes that is to be discarded to have a more secured RC4, by analyzing some variants of it. All the algorithms, including the original one, are analyzed by the NIST Statistical Test Suite and it has been found that it is not necessary discarding more and more number of bytes to increase the security of RC4.

Keywords

cryptography; statistical analysis; trusted computing; NIST statistical test suite; RC4 key stream; RC4 refining optimality; trusted robust stream cipher; Algorithm design and analysis; Ciphers; Generators; Hardware; NIST; NIST test suite; RC4 security; key stream generator; modified RC4; stream cipher;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer, Communication, Control and Information Technology (C3IT), 2015 Third International Conference on

Conference_Location

Hooghly

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-4446-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/C3IT.2015.7060139

Filename

7060139