IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Online ISSN : 1745-1337
Print ISSN : 0916-8508
Special Section on Cryptography and Information Security
Comprehensive Analysis of Initial Keystream Biases of RC4
Takanori ISOBEToshihiro OHIGASHIYuhei WATANABEMasakatu MORII
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2014 Volume E97.A Issue 1 Pages 139-151

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Abstract

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.

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© 2014 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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