In this paper, we propose two new falsification attacks against Wi-Fi Protected Access Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (WPA-TKIP). A previous realistic attack succeeds only for a network that supports IEEE 802.11e QoS features by both an access point (AP) and a client, and it has an execution time of 12–15 min, in which it recovers a message integrity code (MIC) key from an ARP packet. Our first attack reduces the execution time for recovering a MIC key. It can recover the MIC key within 7–8 min. Our second attack expands its targets that can be attacked. This attack focuses on a new vulnerability of QoS packet processing, and this vulnerability can remove the condition that the AP supports IEEE 802.11e. In addition, we discovered another vulnerability by which our attack succeeds under the condition that the chipset of the client supports IEEE 802.11e even if the client disables this standard through the OS. We demonstrate that chipsets developed by several kinds of vendors have the same vulnerability.

After the disclosure of the RC4 algorithm in 1994, a number of keystream biases of RC4 were reported, e.g., Mantin and Shamir showed that the second byte of the keystream is biased to 0, Sepehrdad et al. found that the l-th byte of the keystream is biased to -l, and Maitra et al. showed that 3rd to 255th bytes of the keystream are also biased to 0, where l is the keylength in byte. However, it is unknown that which bias is strongest in each byte of initial bytes. This paper comprehensively analyzes initial keystream biases of RC4. In particular, we introduce several new biases in the initial (1st to 257th) bytes of the RC4 keystream, which are substantially stronger than known biases. Combining the new biases with the known ones, a complete list of strongest single-byte biases in the first 257bytes of the RC4 keystream is constructed for the first time. Then, we show that our set of these biases are applicable to plaintext recovery attacks, key recovery attacks and distinguishing attacks.

Conventional class of weak keys on RC4 stream cipher is defined as a specific case that combinations of the first three bytes of secret key satisfy two relational equations. This paper expands and generalizes the classes of weak keys using generalized relational equations and special classes of the internal state (called predictive state). We derive the probability that generalized classes of weak keys leak the information of bytes of the secret key. Furthermore, we enumerate the generalized classes of weak keys and show that most of them leak more information of the secret key than Roos' one.

In a key scheduling algorithm (KSA) of stream ciphers, a secret key is expanded into a large initial state. An internal state reconstruction method is known as a general attack against stream ciphers; it recovers the initial state from a given pair of plaintext and ciphertext more efficiently than exhaustive key search. If the method succeeds, then it is desirable that the inverse of KSA is infeasible in order to avoid the leakage of the secret key information. This paper shows that it is easy to compute a secret key from an initial state of RC4. We propose a method to recover an -bit secret key from only the first bits of the initial state of RC4 using linear equations with the time complexity less than that of one execution of KSA. It can recover the secret keys of which number is 2103.6 when the size of the secret key is 128 bits. That is, the 128-bit secret key can be recovered with a high probability when the first 128 bits of the initial state are determined using the internal state reconstruction method.

Conventional efficient key recovery attacks against Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) require specific initialization vectors or specific packets. Since it takes much time to collect the packets sufficiently, any active attack should be performed. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS), however, will be able to prevent the attack. Since the attack logs are stored at the servers, it is possible to prevent such an attack. This paper proposes an algorithm for recovering a 104-bit WEP key from any IP packets in a realistic environment. This attack needs about 36,500 packets with a success probability 0.5, and the complexity of our attack is equivalent to about 220 computations of the RC4 key setups. Since our attack is passive, it is difficult for both WEP users and administrators to detect our attack.

Knudsen et al. proposed an efficient method based on a tree-search algorithm with recursive process for reconstructing the internal state of RC4 stream cipher. However, the method becomes infeasible for word size n > 5 because its time complexity to reconstruct the internal state is too large. This letter proposes a more efficient method than theirs. Our method can reconstruct the internal state by using the pre-known internal-state entries, which are fewer than their method.

In this paper we present proofs for the new biases in RC4 which were experimentally found and listed out (without theoretical justifications and proofs) in a paper by Vanhoef et al. in USENIX 2015. Their purpose was to exploit the vulnerabilities of RC4 in TLS using the set of new biases found by them. We also show (and prove) new results on couple of very strong biases residing in the joint distribution of three consecutive output bytes of the RC4 stream cipher. These biases provides completely new distinguisher for RC4 taking roughly O(224) samples to distinguish streams of RC4 from a uniformly random stream. We also provide a list of new results with proofs relating to some conditional biases in the keystreams of the RC4 stream cipher.

RC4 is a well-known stream cipher designed by Rivest. Due to considerable cryptanalysis efforts over past 20 years, several kinds of statistic biases in a key stream of RC4 have been observed so far. Finally, practical full plaintext recovery attacks on RC4 in SSL/TLS were independently proposed by AlFardan et al. and Isobe et al. in 2013. Responded to these attacks, usage of RC4 has drastically decreased in SSL/TLS. However, according to the research by Trustworthy Internet Movement, RC4 is still used by some websites for the encryption on SSL/TLS. In this paper, we shows a new plaintext recovery attack for RC4 under the assumption of HTTPS. We develop a method for exploiting single-byte and double-byte biases together to efficiently guess the target bytes, while previous attacks use either single-byte biases or double-byte biases. As a result, target plaintext bytes can be extracted with higher probability than previous best attacks given 229 ciphertexts encrypted by randomly-chosen keys. In the most efficient case, the success probability of our attack are more than twice compared to previous best attacks.

In this paper, we propose an effective key recovery attack on stream ciphers Py and Pypy with chosen IVs. Our method uses an internal-state correlation based on the vulnerability that the randomization of the internal state in the KSA is inadequate, and it improves two previous attacks proposed by Wu and Preneel (a WP-1 attack and a WP-2 attack). For a 128-bit key and a 128-bit IV, the WP-1 attack can recover a key with 223 chosen IVs and time complexity 272. First, we improve the WP-1 attack by using the internal-state correlation (called a P-1 attack). For a 128-bit key and a 128-bit IV, the P-1 attack can recover a key with 223 chosen IVs and time complexity 248, which is 1/224 of that of the WP-1 attack. The WP-2 attack is another improvement on the WP-1 attack, and it has been known as the best previous attack against Py and Pypy. For a 128-bit key and a 128-bit IV, the WP-2 attack can recover a key with 223 chosen IVs and time complexity 224. Second, we improve the WP-2 attack by using the internal-state correlation as well as the P-1 attack (called a P-2 attack). For a 128-bit key and a 128-bit IV, the P-2 attack can recover a key with 223 chosen IVs and time complexity 224, which is the same capability as that of the WP-2 attack. However, when the IV size is from 64 bits to 120 bits, the P-2 attack is more effective than the WP-2 attack. Thus, the P-2 attack is the known best attack against Py and Pypy.

RC4 is a widely-used stream cipher, adopted in many standard protocols, such as WEP, WPA and SSL/TLS, as a standard encryption algorithm. Isobe et al. proposed a plaintext recovery attack on RC4 in the broadcast setting, where the same plaintext is encrypted with different secret keys. Their attack is able to recover the first 257bytes by exploiting the biases of the initial bytes of a keystream. In this paper, we propose two types of full plaintext recovery attacks that are able to recover all the bytes, even after the 258th byte, of a plaintext, unlike Isobe et al.'s attack. To achieve this, we combine the use of multiple keystream biases appropriately. The first attack utilizes the initial byte biases and Mantin's long-term bias. This attack can recover the first 1000 terabytes of a plaintext from 234 ciphertexts with a probability of almost one. The second attack is based on two long-term biases. Since this attack does not rely on the biases of the initial bytes of the RC4 keystream, it can recover any byte of a plaintext, even if the initial bytes are disregarded. Given 235 ciphertexts encrypted by different keys, any byte of a target plaintext can be recovered with a probability close to one.