11 Facts About RC4

RC4 was designed by Ron Rivest of RSA Security in 1987.

RC4 was initially a trade secret, but in September 1994, a description of it was anonymously posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list.

Several attacks on RC4 are able to distinguish its output from a random sequence.

The design of RC4 avoids the use of LFSRs and is ideal for software implementation, as it requires only byte manipulations.

RC4 is a stream cipher, it is more malleable than common block ciphers.

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Keystream generated by the RC4 is biased to varying degrees towards certain sequences, making it vulnerable to distinguishing attacks.

Complete characterization of a single step of RC4 PRGA was performed by Riddhipratim Basu, Shirshendu Ganguly, Subhamoy Maitra, and Goutam Paul.

Fluhrer, Mantin and Shamir attack does not apply to RC4-based SSL, since SSL generates the encryption keys it uses for RC4 by hashing, meaning that different SSL sessions have unrelated keys.

Combinatorial problem related to the number of inputs and outputs of the RC4 cipher was first posed by Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir in 2001, whereby, of the total 256 elements in the typical state of RC4, if x number of elements are only known, then the maximum number of elements that can be produced deterministically is in the next 256 rounds.

RC4 is a modified version of RC4 with a more complex three-phase key schedule, and a more complex output function which performs four additional lookups in the S array for each byte output, taking approximately 1.

Where a protocol is marked with "", RC4 is one of multiple ciphers the system can be configured to use.