Abstract
RC4 is the most widely deployed stream cipher in software applications. In this paper we describe a major statistical weakness in RC4, which makes it trivial to distinguish between short outputs of RC4 and random strings by analyzing their second bytes. This weakness can be used to mount a practical ciphertext-only attack on RC4 in some broadcast applications, in which the same plaintext is sent to multiple recipients under different keys.
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Mantin, I., Shamir, A. (2002). A Practical Attack on Broadcast RC4. In: Matsui, M. (eds) Fast Software Encryption. FSE 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2355. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_13
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