An improved RC4 stream cipher

Xie, Jian‐Wei; Pan, Xiaozhong

doi:10.1109/iccasm.2010.5620800

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…A number of improvements to RC4 have been suggested by different researchers. An improved RC4 has been shown in [19] and which uses a new pseudorandom bit generator with two secret keys and three pointers. The key size condition for robustness in RC4 has been analysed in the paper [20], and a analysis of modified RC4 following the same use of two keys has been shown in [21].…”

Section: The Rc4 Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

MRC4: A Modified RC4 Algorithm Using Symmetric Random Function Generator for Improved Cryptographic Features

et al. 2019

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The Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) has been one of the most popular stream ciphers for providing symmetric key encryption, and is now proposed as an efficient cipher within light-weight cryptography. As an algorithm it has been considered to be one of the fastest stream ciphers and one of the easiest to implement. Unfortunately, despite its simplicity of usage, a number of attacks on it have been found. Therefore, various improvements of this algorithm exist in cryptography, but none of them use proper randomness. This paper outlines modified version of RC4 and which has the desirable features of an efficient stream cipher algorithm, and which integrates the Symmetric Random Function Generator (SRFG) method. Though RC4 uses pseudorandom features with an initialisation vector and a seed value, the use of true randomness in RC4 is novel in this domain. Therefore, this paper proposes a modified RC4 as MRC4, and which then evaluates the statistical features of MRC4 based upon parameters such as non-linearity, resiliency, balancedness, propagation and immunity. Further, we have compared the security features and confusiondiffusion attributes with some recent variants of RC4 and have found that MRC4 is efficient in withstanding against attacks. The experimental results show that MRC4 supports a 60% better confusion property and 50% better diffusion as compared to the original RC4 method.

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Section: The Rc4 Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

MRC4: A Modified RC4 Algorithm Using Symmetric Random Function Generator for Improved Cryptographic Features

et al. 2019

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“…• RC4. One of the better known stream cipher algorithm, which is used by several protocols like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), is RC4 [Xie and Pan, 2010]. This simple algorithm was designed by Ron Rivest in 1987, and it is also known as ARC4 or ARCFOUR.…”

Section: Symmetric Stream Cipher Algorithmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Bartoli

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Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks.

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