RC4 Stream Cipher Research Articles

Practical Improvement in the Implementation of Two Avalanche Tests to Measure Statistical Independence in Stream Ciphers

This study describes the implementation of two algorithms in a parallel environment. These algorithms correspond to two statistical tests based on the bit’s independence criterion and the strict avalanche criterion. They are utilized to measure avalanche properties in stream ciphers. These criteria allow for the statistical independence between the outputs and the internal state of a bit-level cipher to be determined. Both tests require extensive input parameters to assess the performance of current stream ciphers, leading to longer execution times. The presented implementation significantly reduces the execution time of both tests, making them suitable for evaluating ciphers in practical applications. The evaluation results compare the performance of the RC4 and HC256 stream ciphers in both sequential and parallel environments.

Discovering Unknown Non-Consecutive Double Byte Biases in RC4 Stream Cipher Algorithm

RC4 is one of the most widely used stream cipher algorithms. It is fast, easy and suitable for hardware and software. It is used in various applications, but it has a weakness in the distribution of generated key bytes. The first few bytes of Pseudo-Random Generation Algorithm (PRGA) key stream are biased or attached to some private key bytes and thus the analysis of key stream bytes makes it potential to attack RC4, and there is connection between the key stream bytes that make it weak and breakable by single- and double-byte biases attack. This work shows the analysis of RC4 key stream based on its non-consecutive double byte biases by using newly designed algorithm that calculates the bias in a standard time (seconds). The results are shown that the bias of RC4 keystream is proved and got the same results that were shown in the literature with less time and discover a set of new non-consecutive double byte biases in the positions (i) and (i+n). The analysis of 256 positions is required additional requirements such as supercomputer and the message passing interface environment that are not available in Iraq, therefore; the analysis is done for 32 positions.

Triple Encryption of Images based on RC4, Zigzag, and Elliptic Curve Algorithms for Enhanced Security

The security of digital images is of paramount importance in today's digital world. Encryption is a technique used to secure digital images from unauthorized access. The encryption technique transforms the original image into a scrambled form, which is unreadable to anyone without the proper decryption key. Several encryption techniques have been proposed to secure digital images, including DES, AES, RSA, and ECC. These methods, however, are susceptible to side-channel and brute-force attacks. Hence, new encryption methods that offer more security are required. The new multi-encryption algorithm for secure digital image encryption is presented in this research. The suggested approach combines the RC4, Zigzag transformation, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms to increase the security of picture encryption. Data is encrypted using the RC4 stream cipher, image data is scrambled using the Zigzag method, and the key used in the transformation is encrypted using the ECC technique. The proposed algorithm was tested using several standard metrics, and the results show that it outperforms existing encryption techniques in terms of security.

A Robust Selective Encryption Scheme for H.265/HEVC Video

To protect the information of video stream, many selective video encryption schemes have been proposed based on the H.265/HEVC video. However, most of the existing algorithms are not robust, thus failing to decrypt under packet loss. To further improve the robustness capability of video protection, a robust selective encryption scheme is proposed in this paper. In H.265/HEVC standard, video is encoded into multiple slices, and the slices are decoded independently. Inspired by the feature, each slice is individually encrypted using RC4 stream cipher. The pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) for one slice is related to encoding parameters and the SHA-256 hash value of the corresponding slice header, thus ensuring the real-time update of the PRBS and increasing the resistance to chosen-plaintext attack. Two-rounds shifting algorithm is designed to scramble non-zero coefficients of the transform units (TUs) and then motion vector difference (MVD) parameters, quantized transform coefficients (QTCs) and intra prediction modes (IPMs) are selected for encryption. The combination of coefficient scrambling and syntax elements encryption further improves the encryption performance. The proposed scheme is slice-synchronized. Hence, it decrypts normally in the case of packet loss, and supports online real-time interaction. Furthermore, the simulation and analysis results show that the proposed algorithm has format compatibility, high security and low time complexity, which is a promising tool for video cryptographic applications.

A Novel Binary Hybrid PSO-EO Algorithm for Cryptanalysis of Internal State of RC4 Cipher

Cryptography protects privacy and confidentiality. So, it is necessary to guarantee that the ciphers used are secure and cryptanalysis-resistant. In this paper, a new state recovery attack against the RC4 stream cipher is revealed. A plaintext attack is used in which the attacker has both the plaintext and the ciphertext, so they can calculate the keystream and reveal the cipher’s internal state. To increase the quality of answers to practical and recent real-world global optimization difficulties, researchers are increasingly combining two or more variations. PSO and EO are combined in a hybrid PSOEO in an uncertain environment. We may also convert this method to its binary form to cryptanalyze the internal state of the RC4 cipher. When solving the cryptanalysis issue with HBPSOEO, we discover that it is more accurate and quicker than utilizing both PSO and EO independently. Experiments reveal that our proposed fitness function, in combination with HBPSOEO, requires checking 104 possible internal states; however, brute force attacks require checking 2128 states.

Pengamanan Dokumen Digital Perusahaan Menggunakan Metode Least Significant Bit (LSB) Dan Algoritma RC4 Stream Chipher

In today's digital era, where company documents are made in digital form, the issue of security and confidentiality of data or documents is an important aspect for companies. Steganography is a technique to hide messages or secret data in a place called a carrier file. While cryptography is a science that studies how to keep data or messages safe when sent, from sender to recipient without interference from other parties. The purpose of this study is to provide maximum security for company digital documents, using the Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography method and the RC4 stream cipher cryptographic algorithm. The expected result of this research is to produce an application that can secure the company's digital documents

Steganography and Cryptography Techniques Based Secure Data Transferring Through Public Network Channel

Attacking a transferred data over a network is frequently happened millions time a day. To address this problem, a secure scheme is proposed which is securing a transferred data over a network. The proposed scheme uses two techniques to guarantee a secure transferring for a message. The message is encrypted as a first step, and then it is hided in a video cover. The proposed encrypting technique is RC4 stream cipher algorithm in order to increase the message's confidentiality, as well as improving the least significant bit embedding algorithm (LSB) by adding an additional layer of security. The improvement of the LSB method comes by replacing the adopted sequential selection by a random selection manner of the frames and the pixels with two secret random keys. Therefore, the hidden message remains protected even if the stego-object is hacked because the attacker is unable to know the correct frames and pixels that hold each bit of the secret message in addition to difficulty to successfully rebuild the message. The results refer to that the proposed scheme provides a good performance for evaluation metric that is used in this purpose when compared to a large number of related previous methods.

Internet Cafe Billing System Data Security Using RC4 Stream Cipher

In data communication, against a data security method known as cryptography (Cryptography). Cryptography is a data security method that can be used to maintain data confidentiality, data authenticity or integrity, and the authenticity of the sender. This method is intended so that important information of a limited or confidential nature sent through public telecommunications facilities cannot be known or utilized by unauthorized parties. In this case, data security is also needed at the internet cafe (internet cafe). Warnet which is a place that provides Interconnection Networking that connects computers to form a network system that covers the whole world (global). Each cafe requires a billing system that is used to determine the state of the user in using the facilities at the cafe, starting from how long it takes to use and how much it costs each user. For this reason, so that the data on the billing system cannot be manipulated or modified by unauthorized persons, it is necessary to secure data. The data security method that will be used is cryptography, especially by using the RC4 stream cipher.

Deep Learning based Cryptanalysis of Stream Ciphers

Conventional cryptanalysis techniques necessitate an extensive analysis of non-linear functions defining the relationship of plain data, key, and corresponding cipher data. These functions have very high degree terms and make cryptanalysis work extremely difficult. The advent of deep learning algorithms along with the better and efficient computing resources has brought new opportunities to analyze cipher data in its raw form. The basic principle of designing a cipher is to introduce randomness into it, which means the absence of any patterns in cipher data. Due to this fact, the analysis of cipher data in its raw form becomes essential. Deep learning algorithms are different from conventional machine learning algorithms as the former directly work on raw data without any formal requirement of feature selection or feature extraction steps. With these facts and the assumption of the suitability of employing deep learning algorithms for cipher data, authors introduced a deep learning based method for finding biases in stream ciphers in the black-box analysis model. The proposed method has the objective to predict the occurrence of an output bit/byte at a specific location in the stream cipher generated keystream. The authors validate their method on stream cipher RC4 and its improved variant RC4A and discuss the results in detail. Further, the authors apply the method on two more stream ciphers namely Trivium and TRIAD. The proposed method can find bias in RC4 and shows the absence of this bias in its improved variant and other two ciphers. Focusing on RC4, the authors present a comparative analysis with some existing methods in terms of approach and observations and showed that their process is more straightforward and less complicated than the existing ones.

A literature Review of Cryptography on RC4 Stream Cipher and Hash-LSB Steganography

In the modern world with the emergence of technology, the entire network includes the digital data that adds new dimensions as to how data can be exchanged effectively and safely in real time from one part of the world to another. Such new opportunities are followed by obstacles such as keeping information confidential and secret or data that is a lively area to explore. It is necessary to transform the information into cryptic form to safely transfer the information from intruders, so that the information is concealed from the intruders. Researchers have always found it fascinating to establish safe techniques that would allow the data to reach from the sender without exposing it to third parties. Therefore several techniques have been developed to transfer data securely and steganography is one of them. In this paper, we review numerous research papers on different techniques of encryption and steganography. This paper contains details about the RC4 encryption algorithm, and how steganography and encryption methods are used. The cryptography and steganography techniques ensure the security of the data.

USING A CRYPTO-STEGANOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO SOLVE INFORMATION SECURITY PROBLEMS

The paper substantiates the feasibility of integrating as one software solution cryptographic and steganographic ap-proaches to information security and developed two cryptoseganosystems to protect sensitive information and their trans-mission through open communication channels. The principle of implementation of RC4 stream cipher and block AES is described; the essence of the steganographic LSB method, the application of which involves the concealment of information in digital objects, socalled containers. In this paper, the RGB images and WAVE audio files are used as steganocontainers. In the case of a container image, the steganographic protection of the cryptographically enclosed RC4 information algorithm is accomplished by embedding it in the least significant bits of pseudo-randomly selected pixels. The choice of an RGB bitmap is because this type of image consists of a set of pixels of red, green and blue components, which in turn creates enough redundancy and the ability to embed large amounts of information. The embedding of an AES encrypted text message into an audio file is done by block hiding. The simplicity of the WAVE file structure makes it easy to implement any steganographic methods of hiding data without much effort. Software complexes have been developed based on crypto-steganographic systems. The conclusions about the prospects of the crypto-steganographic approach and the feasibility of further research in this direction have been made. The integration of cryptography and steganography makes it possible to get rid of the vulnerabilities of the known methods of information protection and to develop new methods of solving information security problems from the standpoint of computational complexity and resistance to hacking.

An approach of refining RC4 with performance analysis on new variants

Many years of research on the RC4 stream cipher proves it to be strong enough, but there are claims that its swap function is responsible for essential biases in the output. There are suggestions to discard some initial bytes from the key-stream, to get rid of this, before the actual encryption starts, though no optimum value has been defined. In this paper, by analysing different variants of RC4, the authors have attempted to find out whether this cipher becomes more secure by discarding initial bytes and, if so, what is its optimum limit. Also, multiple S-boxes generated by different logics and a unique key-mixing procedure have been implemented, which made k RC4 more robust.

Application of face image detection based on deep learning in privacy security of intelligent cloud platform

The application of deep learning-based face detection in the privacy and security of intelligent cloud platforms is studied, in order to resolve the risk of private photo leakage on such platforms. Five key feature points of human faces (two eyes, two noses and two corners of mouth) are sought using the multitask cascaded convolution network (MTCNN). The algorithm utilizes the intrinsic links among Proposal Network (P-Net), Refine Network (R-Net) and Output Network (O-Net) to improve their face detection performances substantially. Since many existing data encryption methods, such as DES, RSA and AES, are applicable only to test data instead of digital images, the encryption of eigenvalues is achieved with a combination of chaotic logic diagrams and RC4 stream ciphers. Meanwhile, the MTCNN-generated face coordinates and user passwords are hash-converted and double-encrypted using hash table. The results show that the face detection accuracy of MTCNN reaches 95.04%, and that the image encryption method is suitable for network transmission. The chaotic logic diagrams increase the security of S-box initialization in the RC4 algorithm. The hash structure accelerates the file reading, whereas the hash conversion improves the security of critical data. In conclusion, the proposed encryption scheme is computationally fast and highly secure.

Theoretical Understanding of Some Conditional and Joint Biases in RC4 Stream Cipher

Theoretical Understanding of Some Conditional and Joint Biases in RC4 Stream Cipher

Analysis of burn-in period for RC4 state transition

The internal state of RC4 stream cipher is a permutation over \({\mathbb Z}_{N}\) and its state transition is effectively a transposition or swapping of two elements. How the randomness of RC4 state evolves due to its state transitions has been studied for many years. As the number of swaps increases, the state comes closer to a uniform random permutation. We define the burn-in period of RC4 state transition as the number of swaps required to make the state very close to uniform random permutation under some suitably defined distance measure. Earlier, Mantin in his Master’s thesis (2001) performed an approximate analysis of the burn-in period. In this paper, we perform a rigorous analysis of the burn-in period and in the process derive the exact distribution of the RC4 state elements at any stage.

A Novel Image Encryption Scheme Based on Intertwining Chaotic Maps and RC4 Stream Cipher

As the systems are enabling us to transmit large chunks of data, both in the form of texts and images, there is a need to explore algorithms which can provide a higher security without increasing the time complexity significantly. This paper proposes an image encryption scheme which uses intertwining chaotic maps and RC4 stream cipher to encrypt/decrypt the images. The scheme employs chaotic map for the confusion stage and for generation of key for the RC4 cipher. The RC4 cipher uses this key to generate random sequences which are used to implement an efficient diffusion process. The algorithm is implemented in MATLAB-2016b and various performance metrics are used to evaluate its efficacy. The proposed scheme provides highly scrambled encrypted images and can resist statistical, differential and brute-force search attacks. The peak signal-to-noise ratio values are quite similar to other schemes, the entropy values are close to ideal. In addition, the scheme is very much practical since having lowest time complexity then its counterparts.

A research study: Usage of RC4 stream cipher in SSL configurations of web servers used by Sri Lankan Financial Institutes

A research study: Usage of RC4 stream cipher in SSL configurations of web servers used by Sri Lankan Financial Institutes

Cryptography using Random Rc4 Stream Cipher on SMS for Android-Based Smartphones

Messages sent using the default Short Message Service (SMS) application have to pass the SMS Center (SMSC) to record the communication between the sender and recipient. Therefore, the message security is not guaranteed because it may read by irresponsible people. This research proposes the RC4 stream cipher method for security in sending SMS. However, RC4 has any limitation in the Key Scheduling Algorithm (KSA) and Pseudo Random Generation Algorithm (PRGA) phases. Therefore, this research developed RC4 with a random initial state to increase the randomness level of the keystream. This SMS cryptography method applied the processes of encryption against the sent SMS followed by decryption against the received SMS. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated based on the time of encryption and decryption as well as the average correlation value. Based on the time, it shows that the length of the SMS characters sent affects the time of encryption and decryption. Meanwhile, the best correlation value achieved 0.00482.

Results on significant anomalies of state values after key scheduling algorithm in RC4

It is already known that the internal permutation of the stream cipher RC4 generally deviates from a random permutation. These deviations are termed as biases, theoretical justification of which is being reported since early 2000. However, there are several biases (anomalies), which are not proven till date. In this study, the authors provide the theoretical proofs of all significant anomalies of RC4 in the 16-byte key setting. In the process, they also provide the theoretical justification of the zig-zag type distribution of the 31st output byte of RC4 (first discovered and presented by AlFardan et al. in USENIX 2013).

On data complexity of distinguishing attacks versus message recovery attacks on stream ciphers

We revisit the different approaches used in the literature to estimate the data complexity of distinguishing attacks on stream ciphers and analyze their inter-relationships. In the process, we formally argue which approach is applicable (or not applicable) in what scenario. To our knowledge, this is the first kind of such an exposition. We also perform a rigorous statistical analysis of the message recovery attack that exploits a distinguisher and show that in practice there is a significant gap between the data complexities of a message recovery attack and the underlying distinguishing attack. This gap is not necessarily determined by a constant factor as a function of the false positive and negative rate, as one would expect. Rather this gap is also a function of the number of samples of the distinguishing attack. We perform a case study on RC4 stream cipher to demonstrate that the typical complexities for message recovery attack inferred in the literature are but under-estimates and the actual estimates are quite larger.