Cryptanalysis of Stream Ciphers from a New Aspect: How to Apply Key Collisions to Key Recovery Attack

• CHEN Jiageng

  Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

• MIYAJI Atsuko

  Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two new attacks against stream cipher RC4 which can recover the secret key in different length with practical computational amount. However, we have to point out that the proposed attacks are performed under relatively strong related key models. The same as the usual related key models, the adversary can specify the key differentials without knowing the target key information. However, in our attacks, only the relation between two keystream outputs or the two final internal states are required for the attacker. In addition, we discover a statistical bias of RC4 which is the key point to one of the attacks. Besides the inappropriate usage during the WEP environment, RC4 is still considered to be secure with the proper setting, and we believe the result of this paper will add to the understanding of RC4 and how to use it correctly and safely.

Journal

• IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences

  IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences E95.A (12), 2148-2159, 2012

  The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

Keywords

• stream cipher
• related key model
• RC4

Details

• CRID: 1390282681288918144
• NII Article ID: 10031161346
• NII Book ID: AA10826239
• DOI: 10.1587/transfun.e95.a.2148
• BIBCODE: 2012IEITC..95.2144C
• ISSN: 17451337
• ISSN: 09168508
• Web Site: http://hdl.handle.net/10119/11350
• Web Site: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/transfun/E95.A/12/E95.A_2148/_pdf
• Text Lang: en
• Data Source:
  • JaLC
  • IRDB
  • Crossref
  • CiNii Articles
• Abstract License Flag: Disallowed