A new class of RC4 colliding key pairs with greater hamming distance

Authors:
Jiageng Chen;Atsuko Miyaji
Affiliations:
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, Japan;Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, Japan
Venue:
ISPEC'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information Security Practice and Experience
Year:
2010

Citing 6
Cited 2

Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4

SAC '01 Revised Papers from the 8th Annual International Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography
A Practical Attack on Broadcast RC4

FSE '01 Revised Papers from the 8th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption
Attacks on the RC4 stream cipher

Designs, Codes and Cryptography
Key Collisions of the RC4 Stream Cipher

Fast Software Encryption
Passive-only key recovery attacks on RC4

SAC'07 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Selected areas in cryptography
Breaking 104 Bit WEP in less than 60 seconds

WISA'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Information security applications

Generalized RC4 key collisions and hash collisions

SCN'10 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Security and cryptography for networks
A new practical key recovery attack on the stream cipher RC4 under related-key model

Inscrypt'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information security and cryptology

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we discovered a new class of colliding key pairs of RC4, namely, two different secret keys generate the same internal state after RC4’s key scheduling algorithm. This is to our knowledge the first discovery of RC4 colliding keys with hamming distance greater than one, that is, the colliding key pairs we found can differ from each other at three different positions, and the value difference between these positions needs not be fixed. We analyzed the transition pattern and evaluated the probability of the existence of this new class of colliding key pairs. Our result shows that RC4 key collision could be achieved by two keys with greater hamming distance than the ones found in [1] and [2]. And this newly discovered class of colliding key pairs reveals the weakness that RC4’s key scheduling algorithm could generate even more colliding keys. We also proposed an algorithm for searching colliding key pairs within this new class. Some concrete colliding key pairs are demonstrated in this paper, among which 55-byte colliding key pair is the shortest one we found by using our algorithm within one hour time.