Cryptanalysis of a 32-bit RC4-like Stream Cipher,” Cryptology ePrint Archive.pdfVIP

Cryptanalysis of a 32-bit RC4-like Stream Cipher Hongjun Wu Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Dept. ESAT/COSIC wu.hongjun@esat.kuleuven.be Abstract. Nawaz, Gupta and Gong recently proposed a 32-bit RC4-like stream cipher. In this paper, we show that the keystream generated from their stream cipher is not random. The keystream can be distinguished from random with only about 100 outputs (3200 bits) in 2 milliseconds on Intel Centrino 1.6GHz processor. 1 Introduction A 32-bit RC4-like stream cipher was recently proposed by Nawaz, Gupta and Gong [1]. It is very efficient in software and it is claimed that its the speed is about 3.5 times that of RC4. In the rest of this paper, we refer this cipher as NGG stream cipher. And we will focus on the version which is fully specified, i.e., the version with 256 32-bit elements in the table. In this paper, we point out that the NGG stream cipher is very weak. The keystream can be distinguished from random with only about 100 outputs and negligible amount of computation time. We will describe the NGG stream cipher in Section 2 and give our attack in Section 3. 2 The Stream Cipher NGG NGG is a 32-bit RC4-like stream cipher. The table in NGG is with 256 32-bit elements. At each step, one 32-bit element is generated and one 32-bit output is updated. We ignore the key schedule here. The keystream generation of NGG is given below. (The S is a table with 256 32-bit elements. ai (0 ≤ i ≤ 255) are some random constants, N = 256, M = 232). i = 0 j = 0 iterate until enough keystream bits are generated i = (i + 1) mod N j = (j + S [i]) mod N Swap (S [i], S[j])