After reading chapter 8, describe the strengths and weaknesses of RC4. You are also required to post a response to a minimum of two other students in the class by the end of the week. You must use at least one scholarly resource. Every discussion posting must be properly APA formatted.
Your responses to other students must be more than a simple “Good job” or “I agree with your post”. They must also not just be “Let me add to your post…” Instead, your responses to each other should do three things:
1. Acknowledge the other student’s post with some form of recognition about what they posted
2. Relate their posting to something you have learned or are familiar with
3. Add to the conversation by asking additional questions about their post, or discussing their topic further
POST 1
The RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4) Encryption algorithm is a stream cipher it uses a variable-length key algorithm. It means it encrypts only one byte per given input. It uses a pseudorandom generator. A typical input is converted into an unpredictable 8-bit number; then, these 8 bits are run through an X-OR operation. In this step, one byte is taken at a time, and it is converted into a plain text stream cipher.
According to Stosic, Lazar & Bogdanovi?, Milena, 2012.Ron Rivest first developed the RC4 in the year 1987. The application of RC4 is mostly seen on the WIFI domain; It is accepted and used as a standard WEP protocol for IEEE 802.11 wireless land devices. It is used in SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS(Transport Layer Security ) protocols.
There are different variants of RC4 that were developed in the later years, such as the Spritz cipher it is mostly applied in developing cryptographic hash functions. And also, RC4A and RC4A+ were developed based onRC4 concept. They both are much stronger interims of producing robust results in producing complex cipher outputs. (Stosic, Lazar & Bogdanovi?, Milena, 2012)
According to Puneet,2021. The primary advantages of the RC4 algorithm are it is quite robust, and the ciphered RC4 key can only be used once. When compared to DES, it is ten times faster; It can be efficiently used in any given system. The second advantage is it is much faster in producing the ciphertext outputs. And it is quite capable of handling large streams of data at a faster phase. These are some of the given advantages of the RC4 Cipher module.
The disadvantages of RC4 are, according to cryptanalysts, the RC4 generates weaker keys; they discovered the generated keys are co-related to the subsets of the key bytes.There are some vulnerabilities detected in this RC4 algorithm itself, this made it less popular and used in few areas, and NIST also restricts it for its potential use in TLS.Vulnerabilities such as it does contain authentication while in transit it makes it vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. It cannot process smaller streams of data that makes the RC4 viability not so useful in processing cipher for smaller streams. ( Puneet, 2021)
POST 2
The security of files is paramount in ensuring confidentiality of information is maintained. This is particularly for the sensitive information that only authorized individuals are supposed to know. Because of the rising number of exposures and leaks, all data gathered by an organization remains a secret as the information obtained in most cases results in undesirable events as well as misused parties that often are deemed highly irresponsible. Cryptography is undoubtedly the best way used for file security and RC4 is one of the algorithms used. S-Box is formed to generate the key where the results are taken by XOR process with the current or the existing plain character. RC4 has its weaknesses and strengths.
RC4 has several strengths which includes its simplicity in use. It is highly chosen because it is simple to use compared to the other algorithms. The second strength of RC4 is that its speed of operation is fast in comparison to other common ciphers. The third strength is that RC4 stream ciphers are strong in coding and is easily implemented. The fourth strength of RC4 is that it does not need a huge memory. The fifth strength is that the stream ciphers in RC4 are implementable on large streams of data.
There are weaknesses of RC4 that is critical to the state of cryptography. The first weakness is that RC4 stream ciphers do not give out the required authentication. The second weakness is that encryption is vulnerable if RC4 is not utilized with a strong MAC. In particular, vulnerability is exposed by a bit-flipping attack. The third weakness is that the RC4 algorithm often needs additional analysis. This is prior to inclusion of new systems. The fourth weakness is that it cannot be implemented on streams of data that are small. Despite the highlighted weaknesses, RC4 still plays a crucial role in cryptography.
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