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How Not to Combine RC4 States

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Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering (SPACE 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9354))

Abstract

Over the past few years, an attractive design paradigm has emerged, that aims to produce new stream cipher designs, by combining one or more independently produced RC4 states. The ciphers so produced turn out to be faster than RC4 on any software platform, mainly because the average number of internal operations used in the cipher per byte of keystream produced is usually lesser than RC4. One of the main efforts of the designers is to ensure that the existing weaknesses of RC4 are not carried over to the new ciphers so designed. In this work we will look at two such ciphers RC4B (proposed by Zhang et. al.) and Quad-RC4/m-RC4 (proposed by Maitra et. al.). We will propose distinguishing attacks against all these ciphers, and look at certain design flaws that made these ciphers vulnerable.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, 2800, Denmark

    Subhadeep Banik

  2. National Informatics Center, Sector V, Salt Lake, Kolkata, 91, India

    Sonu Jha

Authors
  1. Subhadeep Banik
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  2. Sonu Jha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Subhadeep Banik .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Inst of Tech Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

    Rajat Subhra Chakraborty

  2. Digital Security Group, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands

    Peter Schwabe

  3. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Jon Solworth

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Banik, S., Jha, S. (2015). How Not to Combine RC4 States. In: Chakraborty, R., Schwabe, P., Solworth, J. (eds) Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering. SPACE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9354. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24126-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24126-5_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24125-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24126-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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