A Related-Key Cryptanalysis of RC4

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2000-06-08
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In this paper we present analysis of the RC4 stream cipher and show that for each 2048-bit key there exists a family of related keys, differing in one of the byte positions. The keystreams generated by RC4 for a key and its related keys are substantially similar in the initial hundred bytes before diverging. RC4 is most commonly used with a 128-bit key repeated 16 times;this variant does not suffer from the weaknesses we describe. We recommend that applications of RC4 with keys longer than 128 bits (and particularly those using the full 2048-bit keys) discard the initial 256 bytes of the keystream output.

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Technical report
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Grosul, Alexander and Wallach, Dan S.. "A Related-Key Cryptanalysis of RC4." (2000) https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96275.

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