Paper 2016/881

Near Collisions in the RC4 Stream Cipher

Anindya Shankar Bhandari

Abstract

In this paper we explore the intriguing factors involved in the non one-one nature of the RC4, and explore new techniques and present interesting findings regarding the same. The first part of this paper studies near colliding keys of the RC4, and discusses how these keys are localized into clusters in the key-space. The second part of this paper proposes a new collision search algorithm specifically for 16-byte keys. It is generally the practice to choose the byte that differs between two keys to be near the end of the key. However, this is not necessary for 16-byte keys, and the second part of this paper discusses how this may be used to grant us an additional degree of control.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
RC4near collisionscollisionsstream cipher
Contact author(s)
anindyaorasb @ gmail com
History
2016-09-14: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/881
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/881,
      author = {Anindya Shankar Bhandari},
      title = {Near Collisions in the RC4 Stream Cipher},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/881},
      year = {2016},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/881}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/881}
}
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