Paper 2014/901

A Practical Attack Against the Use of RC4 in the HIVE Hidden Volume Encryption System

Kenneth G. Paterson and Mario Strefler

Abstract

The HIVE hidden volume encryption system was proposed by Blass et al. at ACM-CCS 2014. Even though HIVE has a security proof, this paper demonstrates an attack on its implementation that breaks the main security property claimed for the system by its authors, namely plausible hiding against arbitrary-access adversaries. Our attack is possible because of the HIVE implementation's reliance on the RC4 stream cipher to fill unused blocks with pseudorandom data. While the attack can be easily eliminated by using a better pseudorandom generator, it serves as an example of why RC4 should be avoided in all new applications and a reminder that one has to be careful when instantiating primitives.

Note: This is the conference version for ASIACCS 2015, but in single-column layout

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. ASIACCS 2015
Keywords
RC4cryptanalysis
Contact author(s)
strefler @ kit edu
History
2015-01-05: last of 3 revisions
2014-10-30: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/901
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/901,
      author = {Kenneth G.  Paterson and Mario Strefler},
      title = {A Practical Attack Against the Use of RC4 in the HIVE Hidden Volume Encryption System},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2014/901},
      year = {2014},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/901}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/901}
}
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