IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Online ISSN : 1745-1337
Print ISSN : 0916-8508
Regular Section
How to Efficiently Exploit Different Types of Biases for Plaintext Recovery of RC4
Yuhei WATANABETakanori ISOBEToshihiro OHIGASHIMasakatu MORII
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2017 Volume E100.A Issue 3 Pages 803-810

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Abstract

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.

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© 2017 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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