RC4 - Security

Security

Unlike a modern stream cipher (such as those in eSTREAM), RC4 does not take a separate nonce alongside the key. This means that if a single long-term key is to be used to securely encrypt multiple streams, the cryptosystem must specify how to combine the nonce and the long-term key to generate the stream key for RC4. One approach to addressing this is to generate a "fresh" RC4 key by hashing a long-term key with a nonce. However, many applications that use RC4 simply concatenate key and nonce; RC4's weak key schedule then gives rise to a variety of serious problems.

Because RC4 is a stream cipher, it is more malleable than common block ciphers. If not used together with a strong message authentication code (MAC), then encryption is vulnerable to a bit-flipping attack. It is noteworthy, however, that RC4, being a stream cipher, is the only common cipher which is immune to the 2011 BEAST attack on TLS 1.0, which exploits a known weakness in the way cipher block chaining mode is used with all of the other ciphers supported by TLS 1.0, which are all block ciphers.

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