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IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals

Comprehensive Analysis of Initial Keystream Biases of RC4

Takanori ISOBE, Toshihiro OHIGASHI, Yuhei WATANABE, Masakatu MORII

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Summary :

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.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals Vol.E97-A No.1 pp.139-151
Publication Date
2014/01/01
Publicized
Online ISSN
1745-1337
DOI
10.1587/transfun.E97.A.139
Type of Manuscript
Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Cryptography and Information Security)
Category
Symmetric Key Based Cryptography

Authors

Takanori ISOBE
  Kobe University
Toshihiro OHIGASHI
  Hiroshima University
Yuhei WATANABE
  Kobe University
Masakatu MORII
  Kobe University

Keyword