[53315] in Cypherpunks

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Re: RC4 improvement idea

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jamesd@echeque.com)
Sat Apr 6 01:11:34 1996

From: jamesd@echeque.com
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 1996 21:40:14 -0800
To: Jack Mott <thecrow@iconn.net>, cypherpunks@toad.com

At 12:01 PM 4/5/96 -0500, Jack Mott wrote:
>I got a paper from the cryptography technical report server  
>"http://www.itribe.net/CTRS/" about a weak class of RC4 keys.  The 
>report said that with some keys, it was possible to predict what some 
>parts of the State-Box would be. 

The report was bogus:

For one key in 256, you can tell what eight bits of the state box are.  
For one key in 64000 you can tell what sixteen bits of the state box are, 
and so on and so forth.

Such keys are not weak.
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