Modified RC4 Variants and Their Performance Analysis

Two modified RC4 variants have been discussed in this paper. First, the weaknesses in the basic RC4 algorithm have been identified and further, the weaknesses have been removed in the two proposed algorithms. The implementation of basic RC4, RC4+ and the proposed variants RC4-1 and RC4-2 has been carried out in both C++ and VHDL. The performance analysis has been done in terms of encryption time, security, and resource usage. From the obtained numerical values, it is found that the proposed algorithms provide better security without increasing the encryption time of the basic RC4 algorithm.

[1]  Michalis D. Galanis,et al.  Comparison of the hardware architectures and FPGA implementations of stream ciphers , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 11th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems, 2004. ICECS 2004..

[2]  Adi Shamir,et al.  Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4 , 2001, Selected Areas in Cryptography.

[3]  Adi Shamir,et al.  A Practical Attack on Broadcast RC4 , 2001, FSE.

[4]  Andreas Klein,et al.  Attacks on the RC4 stream cipher , 2008, Des. Codes Cryptogr..

[5]  Goutam Paul,et al.  Proof of Empirical RC4 Biases and New Key Correlations , 2011, Selected Areas in Cryptography.

[6]  Goutam Paul,et al.  Analysis of RC4 and Proposal of Additional Layers for Better Security Margin , 2008, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[7]  Itsik Mantin,et al.  A Practical Attack on the Fixed RC4 in the WEP Mode , 2005, ASIACRYPT.

[8]  Brahmjit Singh,et al.  RC4 Encryption-A Literature Survey , 2015 .

[9]  Brahmjit Singh,et al.  Optimization of the Security-Performance Tradeoff in RC4 Encryption Algorithm , 2016, Wireless Personal Communications.